So whilst I am in the midst of a massive issue of personal angst, with all the internal roil and rumble that accompanies it and the concomitant paralysis of decision-making that follows me into such spaces, I sorta left something unfinished.

Now, previously, I had to apologize to Lyndon for having confused him with the writer of the NG blog.  That was a rather foolish thing to do on my part, and so I did indeed apologize, but I also pointed out several things that Lyndon didn’t deal with and hasn’t faced.

I did so in the post where I made the comments I had to apologize for, and I’ve done so since, including one post that hasn’t made the light of day because I crossed the lines I have once again but that will be used to inform and fill in bits and pieces here.

The Cockroach, once again, decided to be a twit. She’s gotten fairly good at that, and she’s glommed onto this whole thing surrounding the Kosilek case.  For those who are not familiar with the Cockroach, that would be Cathy “Bug” Brennan, who has asked me to not refer to her as “bug” so I had to come up with a term that works. I don’t like to link to her site or her stuff, so that won’t be happening, but you can follow this link to Lyndon’s piece, where he basically supports a lot of the idiocy that she’s spewing.

Lyndon also prefers Ashley Love, who is an outlier in the Trans community, and this isn’t a great thing — but he has also supported me, indirectly, since I happen to be the ED of This Is HOW, the organization that I’m having so much damned angst over right now.

For Lyndon, the lives of trans people and the things around them are not real life issues.  THey are abstract ideas and theories that he prefers to keep there, away from the day-to-day practical realities of life, and as far away from journalistic integrity as he can keep them.  I’m not a journalist, however.  I’m one of the radical T, which means that I’m fairly mainstream (a concept that I’m having a hard time dealing with as it is suddenly yet another reason I become typical and normal and we all know I hate being typical and normal) for a trans activist.

Although, really, I’m not all that mainstream, and this is why people like the Cockroach do everything they can to avoid having to deal with me one on one — I know more than they do, and I’m smarter than they are, and I am far meaner than they are.  I scare them.

Lyndon doesn’t see a reason to fear me.  He interpreted a statement I made to mean a physical attack, without ever once realizing that I rarely do that, and that my particular methods of “going after” someone, and my proclivity for violent metaphor are usually based in verbal lashings and especially the use of people’s personal ignorance, failure to think critically, and propensity for saying shit that I can use against them that are my stock in trade.

That plus I’m willing to admit when I screw up and apologize for such, which is, in the online world of blogging, not only uncommon, it is downright notable. Apologies are taken as a sign of weakness for some damn fool reason, but that’s ok — it just makes people underestimate me further.

So first, let’s take a look at Lyndon’s post. Titled after a wonderful song that is generally considered to be the first “mainstream” introduction of transness into the popular culture, the post otherwise manages to miss many of the points Reed was making in favor of sticking to the particulars of the stereotypes that old Lou Reed standard is using. He’s even gracious enough to include, at the end, one of the you tube videos featuring the song.

And yes, I am well aware of JoJo, who predated, but eh.

In any case, once more the post is regarding the recent decision by judge Mark Wolf, a Reagan appointee, regarding the medical treatment of the prisoner Michelle Kosilek.

I find the use of a tank Girl image somewhat interesting for the blog post myself, given the artist and writer disagree with Lyndon regarding trans people, but that’s another story, like the music thing.

Now, Massachusetts has decided to appeal the verdict handed down by Judge Wolf. Kosilek, now 63, was married to Cheryl Kosilek and was convicted of her 1990 murder. Kosilek has received hormone treatments and lives as a woman in an all-male prison. The murder of Cheryl Kosilek was cruel and evil and the punishment that was decided for on that was life in prison.  And not the twenty year sentence of Life, but the rest of Michelle’s life in prison — she is there until she dies, and that is the punishment that is being applied on the basis of the crime that was committed.

This decision, however — indeed, this entire case, is not about the crime that was committed. I can’t think of anyone who would say that Kosilek shouldn’t be in prison. Prison works that way. That’s why we build them. One could argue that the death penalty should be applied, but this punishment was in lieu of the death penalty because it wasn’t available in that state.  That is also a separate topic, and unrelated to the issue that surrounds this particular problem.

Now, Judge Wolf is bound, in the name of justice, to not look at things that aren’t part of the problem. He’s also bound to consider the valid interests of the state.

Here’s the interesting thing; odds are very, very good that the appeal — which will cost a few million dollars to complete — is going to fail. That the appellate Court will ither turn down the appeal or retain the decision.  This is pretty much the standard expectation involved by all parties, including the people appealing.

The State, itself, and the prison officials involved, all say stipulated — that is, they admitted, in court, that the surgery is indeed the standard, minimum medical treatment available to this particular person.  That isn’t even a question here, at this point.  So even the prison officials are saying — and said, during the trial that led to the decision that Judge Wolf made, that the surgery is medically necessary, and indeed critical to the life of this prisoner.

This is important for me to note.  So let me really drive this home: everyone on all sides of the case, so far, has admitted, in court, and before the judge and everyone agrees that the right thing to do for Michelle Kosilek is to perform the surgery.

Everyone involved says this.

On the other hand, Lyndon, whose ignorance and personal sense of entitlement are on pretty shaky ground and based in his own issues surrounding trans people, calls this decision:

 the asinine decision of a judge to allow a murdering wife killer in MA to get a sex change operation so he can become she.

Now, I happen to love the word asinine.  It is one of my favorite adjectives, and I am quick to apply it, but I generally do try to apply it in a manner that is consistent with its meaning.  Meaning isn’t a high priority of Lyndon’s, however.

This is because he’s saying that the decision made in the case was foolish, or silly or stupid or unintelligent.

And that means that he’s calling the people all around the case that.  As well as the scientists who showed that this was the absolutely critical thing using, well, facts and figures and charts with all manner of data in them.

Facts.  According to Lyndon, facts are silly, unintelligent, stupid, foolish things that have not real merit or value.

And this is important for me to point out because he himself defends part of his decision by citing Chromosomes — you know, one of those uncomfortable facts that he not only uses improperly (because he does not know what the chromosomal make up of Kosilek is, but also because chromosomes are not what determine the thing he’s referring to) but foolishly, as well as stubbornly.

Stubborn foolishness, in point of fact, is what asinine refers to — resembling the action of an ass, an animal. The kind Pinocchio is all too familiar with. In no small part because he did something without thinking about what he was doing.

Funny how that all works out really well together.

He has become enamored of Brennan of late:

If you’re not familiar with (and you should be) Brennan and her loyal followers, mostly of women but there are also men, I have become one of late, find the more outspoken of the T are trying to include themselves in all things lesbian, of course wishful thinking on the part of those who wish to go from he to she.

Which is a nice way of saying that trans women can never be lesbians.  It also means, incidentally, that trans men can never be gay men,.  However, it further means that trans women are gay men, and that trans men are lesbian women, regardless of other issues that may get in the way.  This is a major portion of what Brennan has done, which is why so many of the people who generally might be thought to be friendly to her are incredibly hostile — she runs around policing people’s identities and preaching “pretending to be a lesbian” to people under the guise of political lesbianism.

And he likes that.

I will note that if you aren’t familiar with Cockroach, then you probably shouldn’t get familiar with her.  She’s slowly but surely managed to render herself so deeply marginalized by various factions within radical feminism and even worse within the political class of people she’s nominally part of that she’s basically considered a fucking nutball by everyone.

Her statements and ideas are substantially shown to be false, many, many times, and she’s so deeply uninformed on the finer points that she readily makes mistakes and errors in judgment and thought. This is a woman who has been called by Julie Bindel — who is decidedly no friend to trans people by any stretch of the imagination and who has far greater radical feminist credibility and support than Cockroach will ever have — crazy and out of control.

She is, then, an extremist even among people who are, admittedly, extremists. That is the point of being radical — so this sorta makes Cockroach a radical radical.  And when you go too far in that direction, you find yourself on the opposite side — which is exactly what Cockroach has done. She doesn’t care, however — that is the measure of her dedication to what I’ve already established, over and over and over again in just this year, using her own words, is her ongoing intense dislike for trans women, fear of transness, and outright aversion to trans people as a whole.

Keep in mind, she advocates the work of Janice Raymond, who called for the moral extermination of trans people (specifically, trans women).

That is, genocide through the use of morals. And dear old Lyndon is thinking she’s just peachy keen.

So one could, reasonably, take a gander at Lyndon’s writing and presume that he, as well, is quite happily supporting that kind of agenda, that particular ideal.

And this is entirely focused on trans women. Because, in the minds of these people, it is trans women who are causing the problem, not trans men.  Trans men are women, and therefore not capable of causing problems or trouble or issues.

We can tell this, and demonstrate it, using their own words.  For example, Lyndon does it in his post:

It’s not enough for the radical T to stand up for themselves, which of course is fine and dandy and they should, but they try to encroach on lesbian rights and issues, which of course they are not and never can be.

Seriously give that some thought for a moment. Just pause and read through it.  What he’s saying is either that trans men are not men, or that they can not be lesbians.

This is easy to tell because he isn’t thinking about trans men, he’s ONLY thinking about trans women. Cockroach does the same thing — and that blindness is part of the reason why I’ve managed to hand her her lunch on more than a few occasions, and why it is that she is absolutely convinced that many, many other people who write entirely separate blog from mine are all me.  The whole hilarity of what she said on tumblr regarding several tumblr blogs all being written and operated by me, when I have many, many other things to do and even if I didn’t, would have to be capable of writing three and four posts simultaneously and having discussions with people I don’t even know purely online is something that should be a blog post in and of itself, but in the end, the deal with that she’s has stated that I operate at least five of the blogs on tumblr by myself.

That’s my getting to her when she sees me everywhere.  And I don’t ever have to do anything other than teach others how to deal with people like her. BEcause, in the end, t is always the same arguments, always the same basic ideas, always the same mistakes and ignorance that is at the base of it.

And all of that applies to Lyndon, as well.

I noted previously that he doesn’t understand Transness.  That he has a personal desire to be able to identify it by sight — when even trans people can’t do that.  We have to go by actions and a history.  Hell, everyone does.  But that means that transness isn’t simple, isn’t cut and dried and neatly able to be wrapped up n a box that allows further stereotypes to form.

It isn’t, but he has a compelling desire for that. It makes his life easier, and he has a personal need that must be met for that — which stems from a sense of entitlement, a sense of being better than a trans person, more “real” than a trans person.  And all of that is basically just him being a fucking idiot.

Which is ok, really — most people are when it comes to trans people.  Which is why he can sit there and write things like how this decision — which he knows next to nothing about — is asinine and be so incredibly wrong.

It’s all in the chromosomes not surgical mutilation.

That is yet another quote. There is, perhaps, no easier and more profound way of identifying someone who is irrevocably anti-trans, who hates trans people, than someone who would describe a medically necessary procedure as mutilation.

He just said that everyone who has ever had surgery to repair a broken limb is mutilated.  That every brain surgery recipient and every heart surgery recipient is mutilated.

He just said that every woman who has ever had a Cesarean section is mutilated. That’s what he’s said, but he can’t admit that because he only has a problem with the surgery that is conducted on trans women. Which is a personal problem for him that indicates he is either utterly an irredeemably ignorant of the science and the decades of study that have gone into this and is just opening his mouth without doing due diligence as his self-proclaimed profession’s ethics state he should follow (thus making him unethical) or he’s a complete and total dweeb of a transphobe that just hates trans people because he just hates trans people.

All that, from one line. One line that is also, I will note, an outright lie. It isn’t in the chromosomes.  It’s in the genes — and the epigenetics, and in the physiological development in the womb, and in the brain development post parturition.

But integrity is not the concern that he has here.  Nor is ethics.  Nor, for that matte,r are facts, or truths.  What concerns him, mostly, is getting other people to see things his way — in the same fashion that many people see what he is as an aberration and wrong and horrible and a mistake and a sin and a curse and even the literal evidence that satan exists. seriously — some of the shit I’ve heard is amazing, because there are people who hate gay folks in the same way that he is hating on trans folk, and he can’t see that he’s not any different because to him there is no such thing as a real trans person.

We know that because of what provoked the earlier post to him: he was unable to tell — when everyone else pretty much could — the difference between Kosilek (who has a decade of the hardest path to follow behind her) and the idiot who claims he was made trans (and also gay, I will note) by taking a fucking pill that requires complete fabrication and doesn’t occur naturally that was introduced in the mid 198′s and put on the market in the mid 90′s after being developed in a lab based on what they noted happened to children who were, ahem, intersex from a paper originally published in 1974.

Meanwhile, trans people were around a fuck all lot longer than that.  But hey, a small bit of thinking and thirty fucking seconds of research doesn’t matter to him, because he’s a former journalist, not a current one.  He’s now just an asshole for hire.

Now, he has invited me on to the show he does.  And I am going to go on (assuming, of course, he’ll still have me, which I think likely), once we can make the arrangements and I know TIH will get a favorable plug, lol.

It isn’t hemorrhoids that I am so interested in removing from his hind end as the insistence that he’s competent to speak to any of these issues relating to trans people.  The only hemorrhoids I can think of he might have that I would like to remove from him are Ashley and Cockroach. But, well, I dislike the thought of hanging around that part of his anatomy — I’m still pretty keyed in on that thing that I’m not able to be according to him, but generally find that I’m quite happy with the man I have.

Now, I did mention Brennan a lot here. so let’s look at what it was that he was linking to sand saying he agreed with.

Of course, I should link to some of what I have pointed out previously: http://www.dyssonance.com/why-jane-crow/, http://www.dyssonance.com/irrational-critical-examination-of-a-response-to-critics/, http://www.dyssonance.com/how-radfems-oppress-trans-people/, http://www.dyssonance.com/using-existing-stigma-to-attack-trans-people/, http://www.dyssonance.com/an-example-of-anxiety-aversion-animus/ as some examples where much of what she talks about are already dealt with.

Shortly after she posted the bit linked to by Lyndon, I was notified, and duly wrote a post that I finished and then didn’t publish.

Here’s much of that post:

has an issue with Civil Rights.  She has had an issue with civil rights for a very long time. But it comes to the fore when it concerns trans people.

So let’s look at what she’s recently said about Kosilek.

First off, she has managed to get the strange and decidedly non-scientific idea into her head that gender identity is bad for women.  That is, that innate characteristics that all people have include those that are harmful to some of those people.

Seriously. If nothing else, that alone should tell you just how utterly out of touch and beyond the reach of actual knowledge she is.  Not only that, but she is bound and determined to make other people think like she does — that is, to ignore fact and run off with superstition. SO let me get this out of the way before I move on.

Cathy Brennan has a gender identity. It is inescapable. She’s a human being. Therefore, she has one.  Furthermore, since she is a “political lesbian”, it is not too much of a stretch to presume that said gender identity is culturally identifiable as that of a woman for the culture she is present in..

Just saying. She is also a cis person of one sort or another.

Which I point out because she puts a lot of effort into saying that she is neither of those things. So my saying so really annoys the fuck out of her — but, as I’ve noted over and over again, this isn’t about how she identifies.  This is simply about what she is.

She makes a point in saying that the article I am looking at right now is not for women such as myself, or for women who agree with her.

She is after women who disagree with her and who agree with me, at least in principle.

And she’s using an outlier — a single one — to make a case that should apply to all trans people, which is not only intentional fear mongering, but also based in her need to minimize in her own mind the fact that she’s a bigot who does, says, and thinks bigoted things.

She’s factually wrong.

She says that the trans rights movement is only twenty-odd years old.  Twenty years ago was 1992. Seeing that, one would say that she’s basically laying the start of the trans rights movement at the feet of Leslie Feinberg.

That’s factually incorrect.  The modern movement started in 1964. The overall movement started in the late 1800′s. What she’s thinking of is the rise of the sense of shared identity unique to trans people — the development of “trans” as a concept that can, really, be tracked back to then.

But that’s not the movement, that’s just the point where the movement recovered from perhaps the most brutal attack on a minority population in modern times.

She states that she has written before about how she supports protecting trans people from irrational discrimination — but we have also seen that her irrational discrimination against trans people is not supposed to be included in those rules, and that she does, in practical terms, actually do the very things those protections are supposed to stop.

She does, then, what she says she supports outlawing, and doesn’t see how those two things are contradictory.  She wants to claim she is an ally in order to gain the social benefits of being such, but she doesn’t want to be an ally because of her own personal issues with transness.  She’s a transphobe.

Because she feels that her irrational discrimination is actually rational — and she relies on a neat little trick to make this happen. Aside from the confirmation bias that is prevalent in her article, she’s actively seeking to make it seem like there is a perfectly good, absolutely legitimate reason for people to be irrationally terrified of something — specifically, trans people, and even more accurately, trans women, since she never sees any personal risk from trans men.

She likens discrimination to judgement. Judgment of safety — she basically makes the same argument that was made against black men for decades — some of them are a risk to certain women, and so they all need to be punished, and this is rational and reasonable.

Make note of this argument. We will see it used by the people she’s supporting when they get down to the wire in the decades to come.

The risk she uses is the risk of rape.  This is important, because it is the point where she falls off the log and pretends to be single faced when she’s being duplicitous.

She says that for Kosilek, the point isn’t just about the sex change.

And yet, according to the testimony provided in the case, over a decade, the simple fact of the matter is that it is just about the sex change.  And said treatment is absolutely essential and the bare minimum needs to be done, and that bare minimum has been proven to be that sex change.  The surgical reassignment is medically necessary. To a degree that is proven well beyond the typical needs of the typical person because this person is incarcerated and had to prove it with a mountain of evidence compiled over years and under close supervision and intense resistance to anything that could be interpreted any other way.

No, what she really means is that since Kosilek has said that she’d like to be in a women’s prison after the surgery, to her, that means that the point is the surgery, its to get into a women’s prison.

To her, to Cathy Brennan.  This means that she is absolutely projecting her concerns onto Michelle. Part of the evidence for which is her continued and purposeful use of masculine pronouns for Michelle exclusively.

SO let’s just point out that we have a person who is supposedly supportive of the right of trans people to be free from irrational discrimination irrationally discriminating against a trans person named Michelle Kosilek because in Brennan’s view, Kosilek doesn’t deserve to be called she.

And of course, Brennan, a cis woman, knows far more about what Kosilek, a trans person, deserves than professionals and people who have the education and skills to know such. We know because she is on the warpath here over this — to her, she absolutely knows better and is hellbent on making people who are far more knowledgeable than her on the subject see the light.

Just like any five-year-old who wants candy at the store.

Following that, in a so-called attempt to reach people who already know that srs does not make a second asshole and recognize the assertion there as being homophobic, she notes via a link that a neo-vagina (which is a term also used for any cis woman’s vagina that has been reconstructed, as occasionally happens in various situations) is merely a second asshole.

And expects that to make an impression.  So we have her being factually inaccurate yet again.  In all cases, she does so to leave in the minds of the reader a building suggestion, a possibility.

And then she uses that assertion to discriminate, irrationally, against Michelle yet again, by saying that housing her after surgery with women is not the right thing to do.

She then hits you over the head with her weapon of choice, but she doesn’t quite say it yet: women in women’s prisons are subject to really high rates of sexual assault.  Women get pregnant in women’s only prisons, and are often forced into abortions or less often to carry the child to term and deliver it into adoption or state custody.

How do women in women’s prisons get pregnant, you might ask?  Rape.  By guards.  Who are not trans women who have had surgery.

And yes, there is a huge mess to handle there and it deserves much more attention, but that isn’t her point.  She isn’t speaking about that to stop it, she’s speaking about it in order to create a connection in people’s minds between Michelle Kosilek and prison rape of women by trans people.

Really.

Then she pulls up the stats on women of color. Again, to say that they should have a voice in this decision about someone’s civil rights — basically saying that civil rights are up for grabs, that people should be allowed to vote on other people’s civil rights.

Other people who have commented on this case have said that there are exceptions to every rule, and here Brennan is saying the same thing.  Everyone deserves the same civil rights, but some people deserve more civil rights than others.

After that, she wanders into other services for women — with a focus on disadvantaged women, never once stopping to realize that Kosilek, who is in jail for the rest of her life, isn’t likely to ever take advantage of those services.  And this is where she suddenly treads into the waters of how other trans people — trans women, aren’t really women and therefore do not deserve access to the very same services that women need, including them.

This is what I said she would do — use this case to make a case against all trans women.

Such as myself.  Apparently, according to her, I am a high risk individual who should not be allowed to access any of these services. Homeless women’s services. Sex worker outreach services. Transitional housing for women. temporary emergency shelters.

Here, we have her arguing that the Salvation army shelters should not allow trans women into their shelters for women.

Literally.

And this is exactly what led to the death of a trans woman by freezing.  Because trans women aren’t allowed into men’s shelters since they aren’t men.

Which men seem to understand, but she’s having a hard time with.

So she is arguing that the death of a trans activist by exposure was the right things to do.

She makes a point of attacking specific people in her post: Rea Carey, Shannon Minter (a guy who she calls a lesbian, btw), Lisa Mottet, Kate Kendall, and Liz Seaton as “upper middle class white lesbians” when she, herself, is an upper middle class white lesbian (gotta love the irony there) and then wails about how the poor minorities are being ignored by them (despite all of the people she names working for poor minority women, many of whom happen to be trans women of color).

Then she plays the I have trans friends too card. And she even likes them.  Because she has to avoid any repercussions for being a transphobe.

Which she is.  Deep down, and also not so deep down.  She puts up with her trans friends.  And she’s proven it.  Her trans friends are not allowed to be lesbians. She has cited someone who uses the name “gay not queer” as a friend, and this person says they are ‘ex-trans’.  And spends their day saying really horrible shit about trans people.

Have to wonder about her trans friends.  After all, she is someone who runs around calling trans women “he”.  Not too many trans people are going to hang tight with someone who does that.  Ever.  Some will, absolutely.  There are always going to be people who care more about keeping themselves secret than standing up for other people.

Because her trans friends are stealth or trans people who are soundly condemned within the wider trans community since they are just as transphobic as she is (and that’s easy to find in the trans community, even in the mainstream part of it).

She says they like her, even though she doesn’t believe they are female.  Because her belief trumps their existence.

And then she says that these people she dislikes should support the right of men to enter into women’s space.  Revealing the basics of her ideas — trans women are Menz.

And never, ever, in no way, cut and dried, black and white, should Menz ever be allowed in women’s spaces.

Ever.

Yet the people she is speaking to, presumably, are aware that trans women are women.  Not men. And so they should be allowed into women’s spaces.

And then she shifts back to Michelle Kosilek, the tool she is using, just as she has used the experiences of women of color and women in prison so far.  TOols to her, all of them, She has no personal dog in this hunt (though she’ll gladly tell you that her mother was a correctional facility guard).

And she reveals that she’s angry that after the surgery happens, and Kosilek applies for transfer to a women’s prison, that all these organizations will support her in that.

She’s angry about it, because to her, Kosilek is a man. And solely and only because he is a man, he is a danger to other people.

Forget the history and the research and the rest.  What Cathy Brennan is arguing for has nothing to do with prisons. It has to do with trans women being men.  Plain and simple, now and forever, they are men.

Men.  Not just male, but men. Just as she says that her trans women friends are Men, not women.  No matter how they are treated, no matter how they look, no matter what name they have or pronouns they have or any of the rest.

They are men.  Male.  For her, the two terms are interchangeable, and she proves it in post after post, tweet after tweet, and she’s even admitted it publicly before.

This is how she convinces other people who are opposed to her to join her cause.

Throughout this, she uses the word “Liberal” like a sledgehammer.  The subtextual usage places a deeply negative connotation to the idea of being liberal.  One might presume, then, that since she hates liberals, she must be a conservative.

she is.  but she’s always hated being called that. Her authoritarian approach and her consistent statements make it clear that she’s deeply statist, and highly conservative.

And she hates libertarians, too.

And from that point on, she devolves into a statement that no matter what, if you are fighting for the right of trans women to be treated as women, she will fight you. And so will all the other people who think like she does.

And that’s where it stands, and where her contrasts show up.  To her, trans women are not women. They are men. Period. Always and forever, it is unchanging and permanent.

It becomes a battle cry, a sworn oath against the heathens.

and now, Lyndon has picked it up.

Lyndon would be the exact sae way she is, and lyndon follows the same roadmap that “radfems” in general follow, which is the one I pointed out in the post about how radfems oppress trans people.  He does the same things, the methods are the same, the statements are the same.

God forbid I ever get pissed off enough about trans people to switch sides.  There are far more interesting ways to go after trans people than the predictable and consistent ones that have been applied to every single major group that has ever pulled itself out of the depths to which people will go to marginalize them.

But I don’t have to.  Instead, I can use the very arguments that they should be using against them — because instead of coming to understand transness and trans people, instead of being probative and truly taking the time to learn and grow (as those people who are the ones that the courts rely on have done) and come to understand it, they prefer to make up their own shit about it.

Which is why we get people who say that science is asinine agreeing with and recommending people who lie about pretty much everything relating to trans people.