One question that I’ve run from, that I have leapt breathlessly through intellectual halls of mirrors to avoid is this one that I will now stare in its smiling face:

Am I Breanna Manning?

Global Comment editor, theologian, and trans activist Emily Manuel recently spoke to the media silence and leftist silence around the fact that “Bradley Manning” may very well be Breanna, a trans woman that the US Government arrested before she had a chance to transition and claim her identity more publicly.

Silence is a sinful little thing.

Its threadbare cloak promises protection and even seems to provide precious warmth against the ill winds of oppression. We hope that by keeping our heads down, staying mum, and conscientiously parroting the conventional wisdom of our age that we will secure that most precious commodity of transgender life: peace. I use “we” very forcibly here, this is an article in which I fully implicate myself for the silence I describe here. I cannot plead ignorance, like many in this community I knew about the leaked IM conversation between Manning and Adrian Lamo that has since become the ur text of Manning’s transgender identity in its public incarnation. I knew and said nothing.

Why did I do it? The answer, as I calculated with a coldness that frightened even myself, lies in the fact that if Manning becomes publicly understood as a trans woman, she will be the most famous trans woman in a generation. Perhaps ever. Outshining even the objectified stars of Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, or Jan Morris. But her fame will be for having been branded “T” for Traitor, and in a militarised nation like the United States that is not a scarlet letter one wears lightly. When combined with the oppressive weight of how stereotypes work at their most depressingly basic level (“If one’s like that, they’re all like that!”) there is no way the Manning case ends well for trans women.

Ms. Manuel is right that it is not “bloody likely” that the left will come riding to our rescue, gallant knights in trendily ironic armour ready to stand at our sides. We will be, in all probability, sold out.

At the vicious intersection of ableism and cissexism, we as trans people find ourselves under constant suspicion that we are “crazy”—that our genders are a mark of “madness” and uncivilisation. In an ableist society, this is to be marked for death. The transphobia merely juices it against us in particular, as the class of trans persons. We sit now on the precipice of this subtle, pervasive hatred exploding orgiastically on cable news.

And we are woefully unable to fend off such an assault, particularly if the strike is made through the vector of Breanna Manning, the “Traitor” and the one who “made America vulnerable to terrorists” or somesuch. Lies, of course, but who will defend a trans woman accused of these highest of crimes in the American state?

In the end, we have to.

The risk to us is tremendous. The silence we share on this issue seems protective. Maybe if we’re lucky, we seem to think, we can get through this trial without it becoming a public issue, Manning gets locked up for life, this goes away, and we’ve dodged a battleship-grade munitions projectile.

It is a temptation. But I would not trust to this hope, any more than I would trust to the hope of our hipster knights saving us.

Emily Manuel’s article was a castigation to the cisgender majority on the left who might be peevish at best about accepting a trans woman as their hero who stuck it to the Man.

But there is the lingering question of that great “we” I mentioned at the start of this piece. We trans women. Will we accept Breanna Manning as a hero? Will we accept her at all? Or will we disown her in the hopes that this blood sacrifice will appease the lords of patriarchy for another while?

This does seem, after all, a relatively hopeless fight. We’d be up against cissexism channelled through that realm where democracy as discourse dies a terrible death: cable news. We’d be up against Fox News, the New York Post, the Big Three, and MSNBC all taking potshots. Can you see it now? A “balanced” panel of experts filling rolling news airtime by debating whether or not we are human beings; a Sean Hannity “documentary” about transgender deception; J. Michael Bailey being wheeled out as an expert; editorials in major newspapers that politely cluck their teeth at our plight while saying in the end maybe we shouldn’t be allowed near anything important. To say nothing of personal ramifications: we may be fired, beaten, harassed more than we already are.

It can seem hopeless.

But we should meet them nonetheless.

What those of us who, like myself, have hesitated must face up to is that we do not have the luxury of choosing battles like this, not truly. They choose us—and as regrettable as this function of our disadvantage may be, we only harm ourselves by shying away from it. Manning is getting a lot of much needed support, yes. But her sisters should stand by her and acknowledge her as a sister. If for no other reason than to lend that much needed, precious gift that it stretches the limits of our poor power to give: to tell Breanna that her understanding of her reality is real.

To tell her that she is not only a hero, but one we will embrace as a woman, as a sister.

It may well all come to nothing, but we will be the better for trying. Facing down impossible odds, staring down barrel of society’s collective gun, it is what we as trans women do so well: it is a condition of our simply being. If any of you have strength to lend to Manning, give her that iota in the form of recognition.

It is tempting to enshroud myself in silence, but if there is one great truth transition taught me it is that silence will not save me, nor any of my siblings in struggle. It will not make this go away. Ending my silence will not, concomitantly, utter a word of power that brings hellfire upon all trans people. Ending my silence will deny cisgender men in power the right to bind me in this particular way.

So, how do I resolve the vexatious question that urged the penning of this article? In the end, there is no morass or thicket of complex issues, no great philosophical lodestones to be delicately weighed against one another. There is just one simple moral question and I resolve it thusly:

I am Breanna Manning.

Those of you who have spoken to me at any great length know that I am quite big on the idea that if you scratch a misogynist you will find a transphobe, and vice versa. There is a continuum of prejudice in our society; it’s scarcely a coincidence that Western people who bleat loudly about savage brown men in the Global South who “oppress their women” then turn around and defend egregious sexism in their own countries. But it is always an interesting exercise to find just where the linkages appear. It came to my attention that John Derbyshire, a man who writes for that great pillar of social justice The National Review Online, had this to say about not just the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, but the very idea of sexual harassment:

Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like “racial discrimination“? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up. Is this any way to live?

Kurt Schlichter, who works on these cases, spills the beans in America’s Newspaper of Record this morning.

“When you consider that, more than a decade ago, Herman Cain settled some unspecified sexual-harassment claims, you also need to consider that the only things you need to file a lawsuit are the filing fee and a printer. Facts are optional.”

There has never in the history of the world been a people better mannered and less inclined to insulting acts of prejudice than today’s Americans, yet we’re supposed to believe that the nation is seething with “harassment” and “discrimination,” women being groped in every business office and crosses burning on every lawn. For Heaven’s sake. Aren’t there any grown-ups around?

I might very well ask him the same question; if there’s an adult in the room at NRO, it isn’t Mr. Derbyshire. One scarcely knows where to begin really. An upper class white cisgender hetero man thinks Americans are legendarily disinclined to acts of prejudice? News at 11.

What’s interesting for me, however, is sketching out how ideas this especially odious are not just isolated monads floating in nothingness. According to Lynn Conway:

In his writings, Derbyshire for some reason often returns to an issue that seems to particularly haunt him: the existence of gay males and “effeminate men”. We’ve included examples of his writings on these topics below, in which you can sense the particular and peculiar focus of his horror about homosexuality, namely that some people enjoy “being penetrated”, and his perception of the degradation and humiliation such penetration involves, notwithstanding that “Women expect a certain amount of penetration as coming with the territory of femaleness … ” (J. Derbyshire, The Houston Review, April 25, 2001).

And now, of course, for the coup de grace, a quote from a certain book review Derbyshire wrote for the National Review (courtesy of Andrea James):

Part Three is the book’s most difficult section, because it deals with the rarest and most puzzling aspect of male effeminacy: According to Bailey, less than one man in 12,000 is transsexual, a condition defined simply by “the desire to become a member of the opposite sex,” whether or not that desire has led to actual surgery. The striking finding here is that there are two quite distinct types of men who wish they were women, distinguished by the choice of erotic object. On the one hand there are “homosexual transsexuals,” who desire masculine men—heterosexual men, for preference—and who dress and behave like women to attract them. And then there is the “autogynephilic transsexual,” a man whose erotic attention is fixed on the idea of himself as a woman.

The strangeness of this latter type is captured nicely in the title of Bailey’s chapter on them: “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies.” An autogynephile is essentially a heterosexual man whose object of desire is an imaginary feminine creature which happens to be himself… or herself, depending on how you look at it. Such a person was usually not effeminate as a child, has likely been married, and does not show typically homosexual preferences in career or entertainment choices. The historian and travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris, to judge from her autobiographical book Conundrum, belongs to this category. The consummation of sexual desire presents obvious difficulties for the autogynephile. Indeed, it is occasionally fatal: Around 100 American men die every year from “autoerotic asphyxia,” which seems to arise from a conjunction of masochism and autogynephilia—the two conditions are related in some way not well understood.

All of these types—girlish boys, male homosexuals, transsexuals of both types—are of course human beings, who, like the rest of us, must play the best game they can with the cards Nature has dealt them. No decent person would wish to inflict on them any more unhappiness than their mismatched bodies and psyches have already burdened them with. At the same time, there is circumstantial evidence that complete acceptance and equality for all sexual orientations may have antisocial consequences, so that the obloquy aimed at sexual variance by every society prior to our own may have had some stronger foundation than mere blind prejudice. Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones. The courts of at least two English kings offer support to this thesis, as does the postwar British Secret Service, and more recently the Roman Catholic priesthood. I should like to see some adventurous sociologist research these outward aspects with as much diligence and humanity as Michael Bailey has applied to his study of the inward ones.

Derbyshire, J. “Lost in the Male.” National Review, June 30, 2003. pp. 51-52.

You can go to Andrea James’ webpage on Derbyshire to read her pleasurably scathing response and some other interesting quotes from “the Derb.”

The little games of Six Degrees of Political Separation one can play with patriarchy are very interesting. To recap, John Derbyshire is a man who thinks sexual harassment is the legal equivalent of the tooth fairy, and who is also best mates with J. Michael Bailey whose deeply transmisogynist and unethical ‘research’ The Man Who Would be Queen is a prime example of modern cissexist pseudoscience, is also quite scared of men taking it up the chutney. When one tilts her angle of vision just so, just a few degrees off the horizon of patriarchy, one starts to see all of these things as connected. Derbyshire does not believe these things in isolation from one another, they are part of a fabric, a framework. One notion leads into the other, one idea reinforces the other. This is patriarchy as a belief system.

Who We Really Are

It seems almost obvious to belabour this point and yet I feel it bears repeating; we do not often see recognition of the fact that transphobic cis men are almost always misogynists of some flavour as well (often as not, a fairly strong flavour). There is a powerful connection between the hatred of all women generally and the hatred of trans women specifically. Men like Derbyshire, who at this point I definitely would not trust to be alone in a room with me, in a very broad sense understand what most transphobic men understand: we are women.

That’s a rather paradoxical statement to make, considering that it is almost fundamental to the definition of transphobia that it constitute an unwillingness to recognise a person’s gender. What makes men like Derbyshire transphobic is that they see women like me as “men,” right? Yes and no. We occupy the cultural space we do for a reason. Cis men who laugh off sexual harassment as so much whinging about misconstrued compliments are transmisogynist men as well, and they hate us because we are women. When they talk about crazy women making false accusations they are talking about us as well. They are trying to make our world smaller as well.  The protest of their transphobia, the assault on our gender, the mad rush to undermine us, pathologise us, erase us, or vilify us is, like most masculinist protest, premised on deep seated insecurity. They do interpellate us as women; they just don’t want to.

Transphobic feminists operate on a somewhat different level. For them it is very vital to constantly assert we are men. For your run of the mill, average cis male transphobe, the stakes are different. In a bizarre way, they see what that vocal minority of transphobic feminists do not see: that we are a fundamental threat to how most people in our society understand gender, and that if we are possible, anything might be possible in the realm of gender. It is no longer so comfortably fixed in the immutable essence of finely crafted genes with a thousand millennium pedigree. They cannot help but to see us as women, to see us as occupying that same dangerous, violently contested space that cis women occupy. They cannot help but fight with us to try and keep us there.

Who Are they Trying to Convince?

It seems almost absurd to take an idea to my readership so simple that it forms a bedrock assumption to the epistemology of most regular readers of this space, I’m sure: that trans women are women. But in most mainstream writing on the subject, be it on Huffington Post or The New York Times or O Magazine, that is actually not a proposition that is carried through to its logical conclusions. One of the reasons that I have taken the Herman Cain allegations so seriously, and the aggressive co-opting of anti-racist rhetoric by white conservatives so seriously, is because these things are very much about my experiences and my social location as a woman of colour in this country. Too often we see trans people put into segregated boxes of exoticised and discrete unitary “Experience” that more or less fully elides our lived reality in a given gender.

I have something to say about being a woman, without qualifiers, in America. Many of us do, and many of us do feel as personally attacked as many cis women might when a powerful man tells a major media outlet that women with a grievance should “think twice” before coming forward. Trans women are so hated by cis men in part because we are women. Even as they aggressively insist that we are actually male, be it through hateful words spoken in arguments, debates, or violence and rape, or published work in an academic journal, they are saying that just as much for their benefit if not more. They fixate on us because we are women, and that scares them to death.

Cisgender men tell themselves many rather twisted stories about why we transition, most reading like some pulp horror novel dashed with awkwardly inserted sci-fi elements. Perhaps it’s that we hate men so much that we “castrate” ourselves or that we’re men who drank the wrong estrogen-infested water one day and suddenly wanted to be girls, or perhaps that we were just regular ol’ guys who just woke up one sunny day and decided to transition. However they construct it, it frightens them deeply. It frightens them deeply because we are women. We’d not be much of a threat if we weren’t. There would not be this widespread cis het male moral panic about trans women “deceiving” them into fucking us if we were not women.

Their constant protests that we are men fall into the same realm of that clichéd therapist’s question: “Who are you trying to convince, me or you?” They must cling to that idea that we are men, even as a whirlpool of doubt draws their every thought of us into gendered oblivion.

And in the final analysis it makes sense that a man like Derbyshire, who views trans women as an idle curiosity, fit for colonisation, analysis, and study by a white cis male friend of his, also sees women as endlessly touchable and endlessly lying. The only way the truth can be found is if trustworthy white cis men like J. Michael Bailey cage us and study us. What would we do if we had our druthers on? Why, we might start filing golddigging sexual harassment claims when Mr. Derbyshire is being a perfect gentleman, only seeking to regale us with his thoughts on the deep (and I do mean deep) meaning of penetration ten times after we asked him to stop…

In summation, cisgender men have a profound obsession with trans women, and specifically what we do with our penises. Many cis men wince and get nervous at the thought of a trans woman having SRS, and I ask you to consider the relation between this and Tucker Carlson saying that he involuntarily crosses his legs every time he sees Hillary Clinton on television.

The bedrock truth of the matter is this: transmisogynist cis men hate us because we are strong women… and that scares the living daylights out of them.

Speaking truth to power. This description is almost cliched by now; indeed, it gave its name to Prof. Hill's autobiography. But like the best cliches it derives its overuse from its utterly trenchant accuracy.

Not long ago I attended a conference at New York City’s Hunter College commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings where Professor Hill, in damning detail, publicly testified to her experience at the hands of now-Justice Thomas which included sustained sexual harassment. Her courage caused open discussion of sexual harassment to burst violently onto the national scene, unapologetically breaking the silence felt by millions of women who had been shamed, threatened, and cajoled into pretending what had happened to them was business as usual. The conference sought to honour Professor Hill and featured a variety of speakers, activists old and new, commentators, reporters, academics and friends who all offered their perspective on the matter. It was elucidating and, to turn that blessed cliché, empowering.

The volunteers at the university all wore T-shirts that read “I Believe Anita Hill.” It was a powerful and dangerous message,as much now as it was then: to suggest that one accepts a woman’s reality as real.

It is a cosmic irony that just a little over two weeks after this conference, one which at first felt like it was summoning up something confined to the misty history of the early 1990s, I should discover that Politico posted a special report about how Republican presidential nominee Herman Cain had sexual harassment allegations levelled at him by at least two women some fifteen years ago.

It is as if I attended a special seminar on handling emergency situations and then, practically upon leaving, I find myself having to use all of the tools given to me therein with the utmost urgency. Within the last 48 hours events in the commentariat have spiralled out of control and old revenants that haunt American politics now shriek with window-shattering violence. Clarence Thomas’ sins have been resurrected, countless commentators on the right have resumed bashing Anita Hill, the words ‘hi-tech lynching’ took less than a day to appear at the very cusp of the breaking news froth (on the BBC, no less), and a cavalcade of racism and racist appropriations have gushed forth from the mouths of every white talking head within shouting distance of a satellite link-up.

Yet what is of special interest to me, and what prompted me to say something, are the particulars of what a well-known white conservative woman has been saying about this scandal:

Ann Coulter, a right-wing commentator, called the claims ”another high-tech lynching”, saying liberals couldn’t stand strong black conservatives.

She has quite a lot to say about Clarence Thomas, up to and including her beliefs about where accusations like this originate from:

 ”If you are a conservative black, they will believe the most horrible sexualized fantasies of these uptight white feminists,”

I’ve just returned from the washroom and after careful examination I have concluded I’m not white. But, moving on:

“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” she said, speaking of Democrats. (Source.)

I could just end the article right here as this, in some ways, can say everything that needs to be said about how white conservatives have handled this latest issue with Herman Cain. But much more should be said.

Let me say something very briefly to those of you who may think that Coulter is a professional troll to whom no mind should be paid: normally I would agree with you, but I address these criticisms not to Coulter herself, whom I personally do not take seriously, but to the countless people in her professional life who do. Her publishers, newspaper editors, employers at Fox, Sean Hannity (to whom she was speaking when she claimed ownership of black conservatives), and a host of others. This is also not just about Coulter specifically, it would be more than a little sexist to single her out here when all she’s done is capture a zeitgeist being enunciated in other ways by a gaggle of white men on the right, including Rush Limbaugh.

What Coulter said was elucidating precisely because it set side by side the appropriation and hypocrisy of white conservative racial politics. She accuses liberals of racism against Herman Cain, and then proceeds to say something stunningly and embarrassingly racist that, in a skilful economy of words, manages to at once colonise black people, casts them as owned and somehow exterior to white mainstream conservatism, and sets them up as a unity that antagonises (white) women.

Sister Invisible

It is impossible to fathom what world one must be living in where one could think it is even remotely ethical to talk about “our” versus “their blacks”; but I credit Coulter with giving voice to a political reality many of us people of colour are already familiar with. Right or Left, liberal or conservative, in the mainstream of these movements the white leadership very often views us as somehow belonging to them. Coulter, give her credit, at least grants utterance to the thoughts of the privileged, long censored by the new age of post-60s decorum but still very much acted upon. Credit her with bringing it into the light of honest and proud admission.

The comparisons to Anita Hill were almost inevitable, and yet again we find the racist reinscription of old narratives. Let us make one fact clear to the white rightists: Clarence Thomas was not the only person in that room who was black. Anita Hill is a black woman. Your silence, painfully deafening now as it was then, shows a refusal to speak out against the racism she encountered in telling her story. Rush Limbaugh has the audacity to say that Cain’s critics don’t like “uppity black people” yet had nothing to say about how some had accused Hill of “selling out” by accusing a fellow African-American of sexual harassment. He had nothing to say about how Hill was looked at by some as a “race traitor”; no sobreminded white conservative lectures about race were heard, not a one stood up to say that it was racist to expect a black woman to not have a mind of her own. This is not to suggest that the left was unaccountable for wrongdoing here; they too slipped into the same narratives. It was Joe Biden himself who blocked corroborating testimonies and other evidence from being brought before his committee that might have hardened the case against Thomas.

Clarence Thomas had no gender, Anita Hill had no race.

In all of the fictionalised accounts of that two-decade old hearing, conservatives cast Hill only as the unnamed pawn of liberal whites and white feminists. Yet does she not have a mind of her own? Does she not have a truth to tell? Is she not black? Does she not have the right to speak for herself? Does she not have agency to be more than an unwitting pawn?

At the Intersectional Margins

Every conservative who plays fast and loose with these classic stories reinforces the subordination of black women as people with no specific claim to discourse on race, while rendering the gender of black men as inoperative, inert, and beyond consideration save as a small marker of victimhood. Incidentally, what is defended is the privilege that all too many men seek to exercise: entitlement to women, our bodies, and our lives.

More damning still, however, is the resurrection of the hi-tech lynching mythology. Feminist and critical race scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (the woman who gave a name and theoretical coherence to the concept of “intersectionality”) put it best when she said that Thomas “adamantly insisted that blacks be judged on the content of their characters rather than the colour of their skin [and then deployed] the colour of his skin as a defence to judgements of his character.” She identified a classic two-step, routinely exploited by white men,  and also points out how Anita Hill’s very existence disrupted so many raced and gendered narratives about sex and violence. Hill embodied a complicated reading of the raced-gendered terrain of how black women are sexually assaulted; Thomas offered the seductive possibility of the traditional male-centred narrative of black oppression. Hill demonstrated the complicated calculations that specifically inhered to being who she was and where she was: her experience as a woman cannot be understood without understanding the realities of her life as a black woman. The identity as intersectional rather than in tension, as it is so often artificially constructed. As Catharine MacKinnon put it, her particularities are “part of what being there as a woman means. Her specificity helps make up what gender is.”

And I would add, her specificity helps make up what race is as well.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Both Thomas and Cain’s maleness privilege their race as somehow representative. We do not know the race of the women who accused Herman Cain of harassment, but conservatives already proved that they only care about the race of the accused man. For them Anita Hill was whitewashed: a narrative of the rapacious, sexually animalistic black man which they themselves had used for decades now presented itself as a way of covering their tracks in a new age of minimally inclusive conservative politics. The reinvention of an old white myth still serves the interests of white men in power: this should surprise no one.

A myth once used to persecute black men is now manipulated in the defence of a microscopic minority of conservative black men and specifically deployed in antagonism to women, regardless of our race. I as a Latina, and many other women of colour besides do not exist in this universe. As Ann Coulter said, all feminists are white, and as Clarence Thomas’ defenders often alleged, only prissy white women had the audacity to get all princess-like and complain about things like sexual harassment.

Yet we insistently exist.

What gender is in the modern world is not a universal but a highly granular series of contradictory textures. Specifically, the ways in which women are now being enlisted to perform masculinity both destabilises and solidifies the current structure of gender and race (both being always already implicated in each other). It is Laclau and Mouffe’s suture: culture always tearing apart and sewing itself shut once again. Stability, even as it melts into air. This is part of what race and gender mean in the world today, dominated as it is by new and ever-evolving phases of imperialism and capitalism that are forever struck through by their patriarchal and white-supremacist ferment. Everything new is old again.

The Right to Entitlement

Let us make gender all the more visible here. Watergate co-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, now a well paid commentator for America’s right, tweeted the following:

“Ladies, in the light of the Herman Cain controversy is there a politician whose advances you would welcome?”

I found his choice of background on his Twitter account to be quite interesting, to say the least.

Let us be abundantly clear here: what we are witnessing on the part of conservative men and their small number of women allies, is the marshalling of yet another spirited defence of male entitlement. Liddy seems to be saying, if Herman Cain can’t harass anyone, how will (cis) men ever get the pussy? Indeed, my heart bleeds all over the floor for him. One can just picture poor, sorrowful Mr. Liddy forced to tug himself off to the calendar he’s immortalised on his Twitter.

Lest I descend too far into the most vicious of snark, however, it is also worth reflecting on the fact that pernicious stereotypes of black men have existed in feminism and have been manipulated by white feminists. What is ignored by those who, in turn, seek to manipulate that history is that some of the most trenchant critics of this racism have been other feminists, many of whom are women of colour. Indeed, a sterling critique of such racism in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will can be found in Angela Y. Davis’ Women, Race, & Class. As a black radical feminist she picked this apart from the inside with far better perspicacity and sensitivity to all concerned than the white right’s callous opportunists.

She also vivifies the often forgotten history that lives in the shadow of male privilege: the armies of black women who fought against lynching, like Ida B. Wells, Mary Talbert, Sojourner Truth, Frances E.W. Harper and Mary Church Terrell; the black women who were themselves raped and lynched; the white women like Jesse Daniel Ames whose Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was an instrumental part of the fight against racial terrorism; the black women who were raped as part of white male masters’ entitlement during slavery. The list goes on. This history is as much a part of the background to all of this as the mythology of the black male rapist. Far from invisible, black women were always at the forefront of the struggles against both racism and sexism.

This 1981 book remains deeply relevant. A quote from it at-length is in order in which Davis explains why (poor) black men historically bear the brunt of blame for rape and sexual assault:

It seems, in fact, that men of the capitalist class and their middle-class partners are immune to prosecution because they commit their sexual assaults with the same unchallenged authority that legitimises their daily assaults on the labour and dignity of working people.

The existence of widespread sexual harassment on the job has never been much of a secret. It is precisely on the job, indeed, that women- especially when they are not unionised- are most vulnerable. Having already established their economic domination over their female subordinates, employers, managers, and foremen may attempt to assert this authority in sexual terms.

She threads an elegant line, eviscerating the racist stereotype of the black male rapist while also articulating an intersectional politics of rape and sexual harassment, identifying its class-based dimensions and other interactions with power. Her voice, her analysis, should count for quite a lot.

The stereotype of the sexually voracious black man is still being used, yes, but do not pretend that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly or the rest are anything approaching experts on critical race questions. Much less that they are in any sense sensitive to these issues. The elegance of Angela Davis and others like her puts the lie to their pretended and shamelessly manipulated ‘concern.’ None should concede their right to be entitled to African-American history.

Courage Through Tragedy

How soon we forget.

“All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave.” This powerful aphorism gives itself to the title of a black feminist anthology, illustrating the pain and the struggle of living at that intersection of radical politics, and it came to painful life during the Thomas hearings. Anita Hill was brave. I’ve often used that phrase in my own political life to say “all the women are cis, all the trans folk are men, but some of us are brave”- and I could say the same about being Latina; it illustrates much the same problem, the issues of isolation and reductive thinking that come from failing to understand identities not as little tick boxes neatly separated by black lines, but as being parts of a contiguous whole; where identities begin and end tend to be found at the boundaries of the person, rather than somewhere within them.

At this point it would be unfair to say that I know the truth behind the accusations against Herman Cain, but I will say that my greatest fear is not for him; it is for the women themselves who thought they’d put this behind them and may before long find themselves at the centre of a misogynist media circus. Their names are already known to the press, multiple agencies including NBC News and Politico have confirmed this. All that needs to happen is one leak, one mislaid email, one lost scrap of paper.  Then this might really get ugly. (ETA: One of the accusers wishes to voluntarily come forward, pending her freedom from the disclosure agreement with the National Restaurant Association. My take on this is simple: if Cain has the right to slander these women as having made false allegations only to walk away with a wad of cash that he “hopes wasn’t too much,” they are within their rights to respond. I wish them all the luck in the world if and when they do.)

Karl Marx once famously said that history always occurs in a dyad: first as tragedy, then again as farce. The high drama of Hill’s testimony, where the suffering of millions of women was given bright, raw visibility, and where scores of old wounds were opened and cast into the light away from denial and ignorance… and then the fact of Thomas ascending to the Court anyway. This was a tragedy, if a beautiful one for the courage of Professor Hill, who emerged from that hell with a dignity whose power it was my pleasure to witness in person two weeks ago. She continues to write incisively about politics. Herman Cain, however, with his poor singing, SimCity politics, lazy one-liners, bizarre ad campaigns, and self serving bravado of the most uncreative sort, had already emerged as one of several jesters in the Republican presidential lineup this year. Now the farce comes full circle with these accusations and we see here a pale imitation of Hill’s pathbreaking moment, a sorry attempt to thrash about and resurrect the old ghosts of the racism and sexism that threatened to destroy her.

To top it all off, Cain sang his way out of the glare of press attention to this scandal. Farce indeed.

In the meantime, however, I encourage us all to continue to speak out against conservative efforts to tell us where we stand, and against the right’s efforts to render women of colour invisible and irrelevant; much less to claim they and their white liberal counterparts somehow ‘own’ us. And on that note:

I still believe Anita Hill.

Yet as any of us know, perhaps all too well, this is scarcely where the problems end and I would like to examine a few further issues through the lens of the Shadow as understood by Carl Jung, a very helpful psychological metaphor that I thank Sady Doyle for introducing to the conversation. Let us begin with a fairly acceptable Wikipedia definition of the thing in question:

In Jungian psychology, the shadow or “shadow aspect” is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes, the others being the anima and animus and the persona. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”[1] It may be (in part) one’s link to more primitive animal instincts,[2] which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized “The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object–if it has one–or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power.” [3] These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.

Sady Doyle used this concept to suggest that what we as activists are most keenly aware of in others is often as not something we suppress and fear in ourselves, to the point where we- in essence- project the failure onto other people. The more virtuous we seek to be, the more we define ourselves against the evil in the world, the more likely it is that we will have a harder time seeing the shadow in ourselves. Or, to resurrect my own metaphor, to see the shadow being cast by our swords.

This often works in very particular ways in activist communities and is precisely at the heart of many problems we all confront; it is one of the reasons that being a radical activist always leaves you with a funny taste in your mouth, that perhaps your real ‘enemies’ are your comrades at times. It is an interesting take on that old saw about the British Parliament: the Opposition sits in front of you, and your enemies are behind you. Yet while some people become disillusioned with activism for these reasons, for that ever pervasive sense of having to fight harder with your fellows than against the very oppression you’re purportedly organised against, the opposite has happened with me. It’s actually entrenched my radical trans feminism because what I see is not some depressing and noxious ‘truth’ about what feminism actually is but how it fails often to live up to its own ideals.

The issue is not feminism itself but the world in which feminism is necessarily situated. Our Shadows are internalisations of patriarchy itself that then become projected outwards into our work in bizarre ways. But they are not so bizarre that they are unintelligible.

At my university, for instance, I have dealt with some rather awkward situations with the faculty where a particular pedagogical vision held sway among certain members of the department: shock value and discomfort were important teaching tools. That the people who advocated this were white and cis did not matter as much to them as the fact that were feminists and radicals who sought to include everyone and criticise everything. Noble, mighty, swords of truth thrust defiantly into the air.

This, of course, leaves aside an important question: for whom does the shock have value?

When you have a professor telling a rape survivor to “suck it up and stop being such a baby” because she fears an assigned film with violent sex may trigger her, what does his feminism mean in that moment? It means something rather patriarchal, although he just won’t admit it. This is where every activist movement runs afoul with “the ends justify the means.” For this professor, his radical feminist project involves colonising the experiences of others, harvesting their emotions for the greater good and using them to teach. This comes at the expense of those who feminism claims to fight for, but never mind. There is a radical goal in mind and that matters most: to unsettle, to discomfit, to drag people out of comfortable illusions and delusions.

All well and good, never mind a woman whose comfort comes in precious islands of luxury that she struggles to hold onto.

What does feminism mean in this moment? It means there is a shadow of patriarchy being cast. If a white cis male Economics professor were doing such a thing to his students, perhaps this feminist man might well have a justifiable conniption fit and speak loudly and proudly (and truthfully) about the entitlement and privilege of that professor. But if the culprit is a gender studies prof? Well, he’s doing it for the right reasons.

The ends justify the means.

Radical fashion is a dangerous thing, and it exemplifies itself in the dominance of the privileged even in the spaces of the supposedly marginalised; how white middle class trans men so often speak for the whole trans community, how feminist men are feted and celebrated as if they’d landed here from Krypton, how academia remains hostile to anything but an ideological radicalism that comports with the latest intellectual fashions in the latest obscurantist Continental prose.

In 1992 Gender Studies Sailed the Ocean Blue

Let us take as our point of departure the way modern feminisms talk about trans people. I alluded to this in my prior essay:

…[F]or instance the never-ending struggle over women-only spaces and their tortured relationship with trans people. I have been told more than once that I have two choices. I either support a supposedly universal concept of womanhood and sisterhood that is fundamentally unable to include trans people, or I support a trans inclusive feminism that scrupulously makes little reference to “women” as anything but the most qualified and indeterminate of classes. They are competing Madonnas, visions of perfection I can never achieve. I will be a bad radical feminist if I fail to live up to the first, and a bad trans feminist if I fail to live up to the second.

There is a reason this happened and I did not expand on it fantastically in the prior essay. Now is the time to do so.

By the late 1980s after bruising feminist battles over competing visions concerning women in society, postmodernism in the French tradition had come of age and was rapidly being integrated into feminist discourse. Lois McNay’s Foucault & Feminism and Jan Sawicki’s Disciplining Foucault are thoughtfully complex negotiations with the (in)famous queer Frenchman who got everyone talking about things like ‘biopower’ and ‘discursive regimes of power.’ These early adventures prefigured a growing debate about the role of postmodernism in feminism.

He couldn't smash patriarchy without it.

Enter a brilliant philosopher named Judith Butler and a troublesome book about gender.

To her eternal dismay the book Gender Trouble became famous for its very brief discussion of drag queens as exemplary of transgressive/transformative parodic gender that exposed the underlying pageantry of all gender. This was not the point of the book, nor its central argument. But it transfixed readers (perhaps because it was one of the few perspicuous points in the book) and became the central theme of early ‘Butlerian’ thought in the women’s/gender studies establishment.

Transgender people had at last been discovered.

Or, I should say, rediscovered and rehabilitated. The cis people within the gender studies establishment were now determined to move on from the crassness of people like Janice Raymond who didn’t understand trans people like they did. Now there would be new, dense, opaque theories lardered with new multisyllabic words about these strange people and their strange ways.*

There is another intersection to consider here that is vital to this story and it has to do with one of the actual points of Gender Trouble and the historical moment in which it was situated. It was during this particular period in gender studies that the question “who is a woman anyway?” became especially pitched and urgent. Almost two decades of repeated interventions by Third World women, women of colour, lesbians, and yes even trans women, as well as kinky women, sex workers, intersex people, and on and on had forced women’s studies to seriously reconsider Woman as a universal subject position. Like most such arguments it quickly became polarised.

On the one hand there were those who advocated the continued use of Woman as universal banner around which to organise. On the other were the postmodernists who said women were too different from one another to cohere around any common understanding, however duly individuated and complex, for there to be any real adherence to the concept of ‘woman.’

This is where Gender Trouble entered the debate, and it is where modern women’s/gender studies approaches to trans people begin. For it is here that we were colonised as evidence for the latter side in this argument. Look at us trans folk, they will say, we prove that we cannot even define women as sharing a biological basis. This is true enough, as it goes. But the argument goes further to then say that we may not organise as women for precisely that reason.

Guess who this puts trans people (involuntarily, more or less) into direct conflict with once again? The old guard radical feminists who believe passionately in organising around the concept of ‘woman.’

This is a long but often untold story. It is a story about how the most modern, the most enlightened, the most academically in-vogue feminists have simply reenacted scholarly colonisation for the sake of an argument that they desperately need to win. When I am told that I must side with them because I’m a trans person, because they’re nice enough to accept me as a woman, they are also reenacting the patriarchal strategy of divide and conquer. What’s more I’m having my politics tacitly dictated to me by cis people who know what’s best for me. Echoes of the patriarchal medical establishment and its colonisation sound sonorously here as well.

And there are shadows everywhere.

The concept of Woman as an organising principle is quite important to me personally; politically and theoretically. I do not appreciate being told, in this backhanded way that undermines my self-knowledge, that  the idea of Woman is not for me. When one of my professors says “what woman, which women, where are they?” in response to the use of the generalised form of ‘woman’ I want to say “Right here, in your class, sitting in front of you.”

The Jungian Shadow here is one where certain well meaning people, again with ends in mind that justify particular means, enact a certain patriarchal narrative: that of colonisation and dictation. What these people so deplore in others, so readily (and rightly!) castigate in their foes, they end up doing themselves with trans people because a certain interpretation of us is convenient for a given paradigm.

Unintelligible, That’s What You Are

Regrettably postcolonialist perspectives have a long shadow cast over them as well. Edward Said’s legendary book Orientalism gave its name to an entire school of understanding how (white) Europeans have fetishised and exoticised the “mysterious East” into this universal melange that stereotyped real Asian people out of their own realities and marshalled them instead into a performance for Europeans. Asians, this still-common Eurocentric ideology held, are ‘inscrutable’ and beyond understanding, beyond knowledge and are so incredibly exotic and mysterious. There, somewhere in the Orient, is the eternal Chinese puzzle box of ‘Eastern’ culture.

The racism in this vision is blisteringly obvious, and its dominance is one of the wages of colonialism still being paid out with interest. It is a hegemonic vision in many Western nations that bears down on vastly disparate groups from Central Asians to Muslims to Farsi-speaking peoples, to Japanese, to Korean, to Chinese, to Pilipino, to Pacific islanders, to Subcontinental peoples.

To recognise this difference and to pay it its due, long overlooked in dominant colonialist discourse, the language of relativism developed as an appreciation of the heterogenous nature of culture. Again, in and of itself, this speaks to a truth through a counter-discourse that now militates powerfully against things like Orientalism. But because of internalising the very thing they fought against, relativists in the academy have stepped on a very particular landmine and ended up doing the very thing they criticise in colonialists. Fetishising non-Western cultures as so irretrievably Other that they cannot be understood.

This dovetails back into my earlier discussion of postmodern abuse of trans people. One of the central plinths in the ideological argument about how women can never be understood as a group is that women in “other cultures” (presumably in misty and inscrutable far off lands) are so different from “white Western women” (because the only women in the West are white) that we cannot speak of women as a group. Nevermind the feminisms that have proliferated right around the world around the very concept of women (which includes things like that ‘Ni Putas…’ poster I used in my prior article). Relativism is used to excuse this, to say that these ‘women’ come from such different cultures that we cannot possibly understand them as women with any claim to any sort of recognisable feminism.

They are presumably too inscrutable to do so.

What I am suggesting here is that this species of postmodernist relativism is actually the Shadow of Orientalism and other thought forms like it. Ironically, in the name of rightly fighting such colonialist ideas, we have become them in a way.

This is not to dismiss excellent academic work by postmodernist women who have thought through some of the difficulties I describe. Linda J. Nicholson’s paper Interpreting Gender charts a middle path forward through the muddle using a version of coalition politics that builds on women’s distinctions as a base rather than on a presumed universalism. Unity by other, more complex means. Her edited volume Feminism/Postmodernism also contains many thoughtful and intricate discussions of the debate. Jan Sawicki’s book, mentioned earlier, is still another thoughtful negotiation of the shoals that more people in gender academia should take to heart.

But it is to say that too often, outside of the spaces of free-ranging complexity that academic papers allow, the discourse too often tilts towards this shadowy discussion of how “we” (you know, us Europeans. Even though I’m actually Latina, but never mind) cannot understand “them.” Therefore there’s no ‘women’ and we cannot go on about them. And hey, look, Quinnae’s a tranny who proves the argument, isn’t that terrifically convenient? We’re just so performative, aren’t we?

What trans people realise, all too often, is that while everyone performs gender, that isn’t how it’s conceived of publicly. When we use drag queens and other transgender people as the sine qua non of performance it reiterates, again via a backdoor, the idea that cis genders are less ‘performance’ (and thus more real) than trans ones. Butler herself would bang her head against a wall at this utter misreading of her work, and I know it is one of the popular misreadings of it that so vexes her. She has my sympathies for this, it’s not really her fault. But it is an idea that’s taken on a life of its own on the back of postmodernism, that shadow of Victorian academic colonisation, and that must be addressed.

"How can I possibly make everyone happy with my academic theorising?" (Image Credit: Pathfinder RPG)

Conclusions

I am under no illusions that this is a suitably thorough examination of the complex topics involved. It needs to be said that these counter-discourses developed for very, very good reasons. It also needs to be said that these counter-discourses have oftentimes been used very well, often by those of us who are supposedly not able to speak. But it is to say that there are Shadows to which we must pay attention here, critical issues that our reflexivity too often excludes, and ways in which these newest, freshest of scholarly ideas actually key into ones far older and far more patriarchal than they seem at first blush.

There is no doubt that Second Wave feminism got a fair bit wrong in conceptualising women: trans women were burned extremely badly by this. But there is also no doubt that variants of their concept of ‘women’ have gained a lot of traction, even among especially marginalised women, for precisely the reason that the Second Wave kicked into gear in the first place: because we live in a patriarchy. As I have demonstrated, the important postmodernist questions of “whose x?” and so on are often asked at the wrong times and ignored when they need to be asked. As the professor who called a rape survivor a cry baby should have wondered: “whose political space is this? For whom is the shock valuable? Who is learning at whose expense?” These are vital questions that poststructuralist and postmodernist interventions (adding to extensive work done by the interventions of women of colour and trans women) have given us that should enhance our reflexivity and should cast light on the shadow.

We need to be prepared to ask them. We also need to be prepared to know when those questions do more harm than good and when they deny obvious reality. When you are asking “what women?” it is worth wondering whether or not the very marginal women you claim to be speaking up for are not, in fact, excluded and erased by the question.

Trans women in particular have been speaking for themselves and it is worth considering what we have to say about being women.

I will close by relating a small anecdote that is worth considering with regard to the inscrutability question. I linked Sady Doyle’s article to a friend of mine who was raised in an Indian-American household as a strict Hindu. She empathised powerfully with Doyle’s relation of her Catholic upbringing, the guilt and moral paroxysms it had left her with. I as a Puerto Rican woman empathised with Doyle’s reality about her Catholic childhood despite her being white. Yet my friend found just as much comity despite her coming from a culture that, as some relativists would demand we remember, is so “vastly different” and “non-Western” and so on. She too found that in her Hindu upbringing there was a lot of internalised guilt and moral absolutism that bedevils her long after she gave up on the faith. What does this mean? It means that difference and sameness weave into one another, that where there are distinctions there are also commonalities. This is crucial to remember, and it’s why there are women of some sort everywhere.

______________________________________________

(*) I should point out that, as readers of this blog and my friends know very well, I am a huge lover of multisyllabic academic argot and dense prose. You see how this Shadow thing works? I sound peeved about it and yet it’s probably because I do it so much myself. You know who gets wet talking about discursive regimes of power, epistemological hegemony, and ontological x, y, and z? This gal. So take my critiques as you will.

Not To Be Spattered By His Blood by Edna St. Vincent Millay

(St. George Goes Forth to Slay the Dragon — New Year’s, 1942)

Not to be spattered by his blood—this, even then,
This, while I kill him, even then, this, when I slice
His body from his head, must be my nice concern.

This, while I kill him, whom I have hated purely and with all my
heart, for he is evil,
This, while he dies, for he will strive in death, for he was strong
(I say “was strong,” for I shall surely kill him; he is numbered
Already with the dead) .

Yes, although now with all his shining scales, the one above the other
fitted in symmetrical
—Oh, in most beautiful—design, he moves,
And his long body undulant is looped in many loops most powerfully
flung from side to side over the world—
Yet is he numbered with the dead, for I shall kill him surely.

Not to be spattered by his blood—this, while I kill him,
Must be my mind’s precise concern.

Though the dungeons be empty; though women sit on the door steps
in the sun
And sigh with peace, because they fear him no more—because they
fear no one;
And old men in their rocking chairs sing;
And strangers meet in every street of the world and greet each other as
friends;
And people laugh at anything—

Not here my mission ends.
I must think of my return.
I must kill him with gloves on.

For Hatred is my foe, and I hate him and I will kill him—but oh,
I must kill him with gloves on!

Not to be spattered by his blood—for what, should he be slain,
Done to death by my hand, and my hand be stained
By him, and I bring infection to city and town
And every village in our land—for he spreads quickly—
What then, shall we have gained?
Why then, I say, sooner than that, why, let him live, and me
Lie down!
For it is fitter that a beast be monstrous than that I should be.

Not to be spattered by his blood! —For I know well
What I must conquer.
Can I with seething hatred kill him, and return
And be myself, hating no man,
Once he is dead?

Yes. With God’s help, I can.

Not to be spattered by his blood—Oh, God,
In the great hour of my supreme engagement,
Wherein, by Thy just will
And with what strength and skill I can to the endeavor call
I slay our common foe
(For Evil didst Thou never love),
Lest in the end he triumph after all
And what I all but died to kill
Loop his length still
Over the world; lest I inherit
Most hated Hate, and be his son in spirit;
And Evil in my veins froth, and I be no one
I ever knew—Oh, God, lest this be done,
Bless Thou my glove!—
This one!
And watch that in the moment of my supreme encounter I wear it, I keep
it on!

Now, my bright lance, precede me, and lead me to his head.

My first D&D character was a Paladin, a young woman from the race of angelic Nephilim who sported broad and beautiful white feathered wings. In service to her Goddess as a shieldmaiden, hers was to fight for truth and justice against all comers. The setting? The D&D equivalent of Hell, a plane known as The Abyss whose inherent moral alignment was listed as Chaotic Evil. This plane had layers. Infinite layers. This Paladin, Zoe, was on the four hundred fourth. One woman against an endless plane that was the home of demons, soul eaters, monsters great and small, and every terror imaginable.

There was Zoe with her limitless faith, her sword and shield, and her endless quest to spread not only love, but to find yet more pie.

One might well say that from a psychoanalytic perspective it was interesting that I chose this character, and that it is exceedingly interesting that in my roleplay I rather adore paladins and priestesses; women of faith whose beliefs guide their weapons and their spells into the heart of Evil in their quest to protect the Good, save the world, and find more pie. What is most interesting to me is that this image has long accompanied me on my journeys into the politics of the real world, my own mission out into the Abyss we know of as Earth and has necessarily become infused with my vision of feminism.

It is a beautiful image, as inspiring as a cathedral fresco, with the moral force of the statue of Lady Justice, sword held high in the air, ready to avenge all sin and protect those who cannot protect themselves. Yet she also holds scales aloft; balance, equity, fairness and compassion. Not a shield, but the scales on which Maat weighed the hearts of the judged against that oh-so-light feather. It was those scales, I came to realise, that were much more ponderous than the sword. It was the scales that would determine whether that sword would be shortly stained with blood.

For me, trans activism, feminism, trans feminism, and indeed academic inquiry into society, were always part and parcel of learning to use the scales. Knowing how best to judge, knowing when to judge, and having a sense of honourable ethics; to know when to use the sword and only when necessary.

What Sady Doyle captured so very well, however, is the dark side of all of this. The Jungian Shadow of it all. Your sword casts a very long shadow indeed and the tighter you cling to it, the harder it becomes to notice its shadow, to be wary of it, to draw it back and sheath the weapon. I am not the first woman to stand up and speak tentatively of the fact that she has seen things on the internet within the canon of net-feminism that have disturbed her, that have caused her to swallow thickly and keep quiet in the hopes that she would not be slain by the swords of her comrades-in-arms. But even harder to admit is the fact that I have sometimes used that sword when I shouldn’t, coming down with all the righteous fury of a Paladin, and slaying without mercy. Without error. In the deep of night I ask myself ‘was I right?’ ‘did they deserve it?’

Yet the shadow is longer still.

Madonna By Other Means

It is almost pithy to say that one should not become what she despises. Far more terrible is to actually confront it and stare at yourself in the mirror to speak the quietude of your fall, your lapse. To admit it.

I am leery of comparing feminism to religion as this is often a device used by people, particularly cis men who fancy themselves empiricists or rationalists, to undermine and disregard feminism as so much woo-woo unsubstantiated by “evidence.” But Doyle got it just right. The truth that Carl Jung and many people after him hit on is that Manichean visions are not native to religion. All philosophies, all political systems, all moral codes however complex, intellectual, or plain simpleminded, share in common that Shadow they cast. That Shadow that reflects everything in us that we fight against, all the evil we see in others that also resides in us, that we feel endless internal anguish about. Yet we dare not speak it for fear of interpolating it into reality, into our Light, our conscious waking world where our battlefields of horrendous carnage lay, where things are simple. Where there is an enemy over the next hill, where the sword is your ally and your knowledge of when and how to use it is unquestionably perfect. For you know the truth, you are Good, you are moral and right.

Neither saints nor whores, but women.

Yet the imprint of that doubt is always there, and we fear it because our moral codes demand perfection of us in a quasi-religious fashion. I think that particularly with feminism there is a distinction here that we as women suffer from in particular. Even as we fight the Madonna/Whore Complex we internalise it, it is part of our Shadow, sometimes because we fight it with such righteous and justifiable vigour. Yet that ever-prodigious shadow conceals the truth that we seek to become Madonna-by-Other-Means. We seek feminist Madonnahood, the perfection of being the woman with no past, nothing to be ashamed of, no error, only the perfection of the activist who knows what the answers are and who is always in the right.

Even when we are reflexive and admit error, we still do not speak the shadow’s name. We do not say that terrible truth: that we are striving to be perfect feminists. It bubbles to the surface every time we ask “does liking x make me a bad feminist?” and when we admire people we perceive to have become so very perfect in their activism that they are our icons, they are the people we wish to become on some level. Maybe that person is Julia Serano, or Andrea Dworkin, or Susan Stryker, or Judith Butler. But we look to them as our Saints, they who show us the way we must live, think, and reason, who will give us the tools to say with definitive vision “this makes me a bad feminist” and “this makes me a good feminist.” Lanterns along the way, women who one thinks “If only I could be like her, she is the truest of the true.”

Yet to look at them for five minutes, and to really read their work and know their lives, you see that they are not perfect. They never claimed to be. They’re human beings trying to make their way in the world just as much as you or I.

The Theodicy of Feminist Suffering

The pressure for me has always been to aspire to that feminist Madonnahood, and the perfection this demands is rigorous indeed. There is a strangely Catholic quality to the demand I often hear to show my scars, to prove I am a woman by showing how I have been hurt, to prove that patriarchy can wound me by showing how it has. As a trans woman in particular the stakes are high. If I do not doff my clothes and show those scars, I must not be a ‘real’ woman. This in particular has a strange silencing effect, for fear that if I say anything that contravenes this vision of the Virgin Mary that I must forever be, that I will “prove” to certain feminists that I am not only a “bad feminist” but that I am not “a real woman.” Whenever I speak it is always with this at the back of my mind at the very least.

For there is something very odd about what the perfection my activism and my internalised sense of morality has demanded of me. It is not only that I show my scars but that I, paradoxically, testify to my permanent perfection from birth. In this world where patriarchy has scratched, burned, and tortured me- and where proving this martyrdom is a requirement of feminist perfection- I must also somehow be unblemished by patriarchy. There are some lesbian separatists who take this to an extreme and create hierarchies based on who has never slept with a man. Yet even in less extreme variants this is not uncommon. Some feminists will look askance at you if you’ve ever done sex work, drawn pornography, compromised with your femininity, leveraged sexuality to your limited and conditional advantage, gotten hot at thinking that you were sexy, masturbated in your lingerie, like ‘girly’ things, enjoy certain types of media, occasionally call your women friends ‘girls’, like how you look in high heels… the list is endless.

This is not a litany of how evil feminists make me feel bad for being feminine or somesuch. It’s rather different from that. This is not necessarily about specific instances of this happening where individual feminists have attacked me for any of those things; the opposite is true, I have found nothing but love and support from other feminists for my various distinctions. I have never been called a ‘collaborator’ or an ‘invader’ by anyone in my women and gender studies programme or anyone in the feminist communities I am a part of. What I am speaking of is something internal, why it is I feel this way, and how I actually share this feeling very quietly and subversively with all the women I talk to.

The Secular Virgin

There is this pervasive internalised sense that I must be perfect, not only because I am a feminist but because I am a trans woman. Any imperfection in me is not only a mark against my feminism but a mark against my womanhood as a whole and thus my claim to feminist sisterhood. If I think I look sexy in a dress, is this okay, or is this because my “male socialisation” has made me an eternally self-objectifying being with no sense of self independent of patriarchal norms? This is forever in the back of my mind, for I must be perfect, must I not? If I am to have the right to be that shieldmaiden of feminism, am I not someone who must be completely untouched by patriarchy? The swaddled alabaster babe who grew into a statuesque image of perfection whose armour never stains and whose slight smile never betrays the smallest hint of doubt?

To not be spattered by the blood of patriarchy.

Does enacting this false perfection and propriety actually reinstate old Victorian norms about bourgeois female purity, virtue, and untouchability? Does it not merely shift the Virgin Mary from being a religious icon to one of secular politics? Yes it does, in my view.

From a sociological perspective, these controlling ideas do not leave us so easily and still structure how we think about the world around us. Their nomic potential is so strong and irresistible that it is hard to dispense with them completely. Even if Western culture has become less religious, less Victorian, all of these cultural tropes are there and we have organised our lives around them. Often as not, subconsciously. None of us ever comes to feminism without a history, without a litany of sorrows, mistakes, regrets, and pain. This is the metaphorical stage on which those tensions are both acted out and disavowed.

I once said that I never heard a “this is how I became a feminist” story that did not make me want to drink Scotch. This, by the way, is another instance of that truth that we all know bubbling to the surface. That we, indeed, are not perfect women and that there is the truth of humanity in that; it is the radical idea that women are human- because we are not and never will be perfect by any standard of perfection.

Nor should we be.

Our Lady of Sorrows

We all come to feminism with a past, with a history and with some sorrows. We should neither disavow this nor pretend that feminism is the cure-all for that, for this is another problem: we may be allowed to admit that terrible past, but only to say that once we found feminism it all changed for us. Articulating our struggles with feminism and how the baggage every single feminist brings to these polymorphous movements is much, much harder. As I have often remarked, transphobic feminists bring with them biological essentialism that they have learned elsewhere that became part of their feminist shadow. But this is true of so much besides, as well, and I feel that our internalising of the Madonna, of the spotless woman who never cries, never bleeds, is perfect in her judgement, morality, and heroism, who is the Lady of our dreams, the paradoxical Untouched Martyr, is part and parcel of this baggage we bring to feminism.

We fight so very hard against the idea that a woman ‘should’ be anything, much less a picture of perfection, much much less anything like a virginal Madonna, an untouched marble statue aloft on a pristine pedestal; yet because we know and see this so clearly and fight it with such ardour we almost incorporate it into our very beings and play it out with a strange feminist twist. No longer the perfect virgin of our patriarchal fathers’ nightmarish dreams, we are instead the perfect feminist activist.

If we could not enact the virginal virtue of our upbringing, our faiths, and our families, then we will enact a new virtue, one for real justice and one that is premised on women being people and not perfect pedestaled angels who can do no wrong. …And yet it is precisely this that I have found myself unconsciously chasing through the medium of feminism, that sense of perfection, of moral certainty and righteousness that could both insulate me from the Abyss of our world and allow me to change it.

Thus it is that there are things I have done that gnaw at me that make me feel as if I have not ‘earned’ my armour, not ‘earned’ my right to be feminist and my right to be heard. Ironically and very interestingly, these are things involving my body. These are things I cannot talk about for fear that they might be taken the wrong way, and they are things about my complicated history as a person growing up in this world of ours that, even if I had no control over it, I am made to feel guilty for. Yet it is precisely because feminism is what it is that I came to call it home, a place where I as a woman could be a person, could be whole, could find the strength to live up to her full potential, could find the explanations she needed to know why women find ourselves where we do, and why trans people are so brutally attacked even.

That is the tension.

This is not just about feminism; it is merely those conflicts and those ideals I know the best.

One time in class- it could be any class, really- a person said something that I identified not only as wrong but as expressly anti-feminist and transphobic. Do I hate them? What do I do in that moment when I find myself cooly staring daggers, mentally unsheathing my sword and preparing for battle, the latest chapter in the endless struggle. My Goddess, my Goddess what do I do? How do I not, in that moment, become what I hate because I hate?

This is about knowing when and how to do what it is right, and struggling to believe that you are even capable of this, to whatever limited extent it may be possible. It is to believe that, in the very end, you can do the right thing, that you can inquire and come to know, with all the proper caveats, what the right thing is, and thereby know how to live the most just life. But it is also about what one confronts in one’s self, to realise that one’s quest for perfection and quest for truth is always going to come up short. Every day of my life now is learning to not only make peace in that but find the joy in those gaps- because often as not when we fall short we may find opportunity and possibility as well as failure.

Take for instance the never-ending struggle over women-only spaces and their tortured relationship with trans people. I have been told more than once that I have two choices. I either support a supposedly universal concept of womanhood and sisterhood that is fundamentally unable to include trans people, or I support a trans inclusive feminism that scrupulously makes little reference to “women” as anything but the most qualified and indeterminate of classes. They are competing Madonnas, visions of perfection I can never achieve. I will be a bad radical feminist if I fail to live up to the first, and a bad trans feminist if I fail to live up to the second.

I fail to live up to both, and yet I am quite fine with this. It is in that gap between where I stand, sword and scales in hand, and where those camps of feminists want me to be that I see a real possibility. A powerful sisterhood that includes trans women. From my failure is born something new, something just as real, and something that is marvellously, riotously imperfect.

Over the Next Hill 

Feminism is not the sole source of my morality, and being a feminist does not make me a good or better person; it is the same trap I fell into when I was a young and naive liberal who thought all liberal people were the “good guys.” One’s morality is always both inside and out, always external and internal to your belief systems. It is a Mobius strip that weaves seamlessly in and out of your various philosophical convictions, two sided while having only one side.

This is what we all struggle with on some level; feminism is merely one enormous field on which those struggles are played out, in which the drama of our moral dilemmas takes on particular shades and uses particular props. For all of feminisms’ imperfections, trials, and struggles, it is through being a feminist that I have learned something very critical: that there is no final answer and no final truth.

One must remember that the scales are there to be used at every juncture, which means that your morality, your ethics are changeable and contextual. We do not (and must not) approach every case, every dilemma, every question with the scales already set. There is something freeing in this, to see possibility over the next horizon, a new setting for my scales, rather than just another enemy into whom my sword must be run.

It is freedom entirely from the metaphors of militarism, freedom from the blade entirely that can lie over the next horizon. Not just shieldmaiden, but sister, lover, friend, and ball-of-fluff to someone who may need a hug as much as yet more fighting. It is the realisation that sharing love and sharing fraternity does not require that you have all the answers, just as I may not know what to tell a weeping friend, but I know that I must at least embrace and comfort them. Answers are not what are needed at all times, there is no single truth that infuses my embracing of my sisters, brothers, and siblings.

To glory in complexity, that is the bliss that is refuge from my struggles.

It is times like these when I understand and honour why people like Shulamith Firestone reduced their political activity and sometimes left activism entirely. One of the most strangely moving things I’d read about feminist lives lived in private was that on the night she died Andrea Dworkin was watching Will and Grace. She was the real woman standing beneath the shieldmaiden in the stained glass window. There were any number of things she might have critiqued about that show, yet her life was not the critique, and she had to relax, watch something, and laugh a little. To put down the sword for just a half hour. Just enough.

Sisters of Janus: Therese and Jeanette Voerman from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Both blonde haired, pallid women, one wearing a dark grey business suit and black rimmed glasses, the other wearing a stylised schoolgirl's outfit, bra and thong visible, and a blood red choker. She also wears deep makeup.

When I play certain video games I get the strange feeling of wandering through the weird and lurid landscape of a Dali painting; beholding the familiar, albeit distorted in the strangest of ways.

One might expect this. After all, video games are not supposed to be realistic by default. They operate on their own internal logic, their worlds hewn out of something called ‘game design needs’ rather than say billions of years of geology and thousands of years of culture and history, for instance. But I came to realise it was something beyond that point which I could comfortably suspend my disbelief and immerse. What jarred me out of, almost consistently, was the fact that many games have had the pretension of being representations of the real.

A artificially warped landscape is a good and interesting thing so long as one does not purport that it is, in fact, akin to a photograph.

Rated M for Misconception

Whenever one hears the word “gritty” or “grimdark” appended to other adjectives used to describe a video game, you’ve likely stumbled on a game that does what I’m going to discuss in this article: promote a rather cliched perspective as ‘real’. Various other euphemisms for this include ‘adult’, ‘mature’, and the like. Let’s take Kieron Gillen’s review of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for Eurogamer and allow it to speak for itself:

“Bloodlines has the best script I’ve seen in a videogame since… well, since ever. In recent times, Planescape is probably hits the same peaks that Bloodlines does, and has the advantage of mass of words, but in terms of writing a modern, adult videogame, no-one’s come near. No-one’s even tried.

It makes cultural references with the casualness of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about – there’s a particularly memorable off-hand gag about fetish slang which dazzled me with the skill, audacity and comfort it showed. Where most games that try something similar come across as callow posturing, this was done as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It deals with the big adult topics – sex, death, whatever – in truthful and honest ways. It has characters who swear as much as anyone out of Kingpin – but they’re characters who swear rather than an attempt to turn the game into a noir thriller by lobbing a few four-letter words into the mix. Conversely, there are characters who have perfectly civil aspects. Troika has done the writerly thing – that is attempt to write people rather than ciphers. I can only applaud.

So ‘truth and honesty’ are themes in this game, apparently, of a rather dramatic sort. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a roleplaying game set in a deeply noir Los Angeles, replete with weakly flickering neon, smoky back rooms, and the thrumming bass of rebellious club music set to the jingling chains of the mosh pit dancers. This game is nothing if not deeply possessed of atmosphere. You wander about as a newly initiated vampire in this world, a creature of the night learning the true meaning thereof in a fast-paced auto da fe of supernatural life. Aside from the cool colours of night and the chiaroscuro template of Gothy dusk that define the game’s palette, the other is of course red. A crimson that splatters many a wall.

VtM:B is a passionately violent game complete with murder, dismemberment, exploding bodies, torture, flesh eating, and, of course, rape. For how could one find true verisimilitude without sexual violation?

All of this begins to dissolve into the usual narrative that can be reduced to the following equation: “There will be blood, there will be tits; therefore there is maturity and realism.”

For there are tits. So many tits in this game. Let us revisit Mr. Gillen’s review for an interesting look at that… dimension of the story:

Take the most obviously eyebrow-raising character, Jeanette (The goth-schoolgirl whose top strains with obvious implants). While on the box you may take her as mere wrist-fodder for the strained-testicle-possessing members of the audience, she’s not treated as such. When she speaks, she’s a babble of egocentric nonsense – predictable, as she’s a Malkavian. However, it’s carefully judged egocentric nonsense. She’s essentially a goth LiveJournal with legs, and, in her extreme way, credible. Even the fact she has a ludicrous cleavage ties in tightly to the plot. Rather than many games where every woman thrusts D-cups and upwards in your direction, Vampire chooses. In Santa Monica at least, no-one has a cleavage like Jeanette. Why is she like that? To Troika’s eternal credit, it provides a reason. And if you ever wander into something that plays to what’s cheerfully described as “fan-service”, it’s because you’ve gone out hunting after it yourself.

When I read over this paragraph I felt an indescribable weirdness. I understood what he was getting at and for what it is worth, I agree to a limited extent, but the manner in which he chose to express himself is quite interesting to say the very least.

Before I analyse this further, I’d like to draw your attention to the words of a retrospective panel at Computer and Video Games about this particular title.

The panel’s views:

Steve: “It’s got that one with the big tits who looks like Britney Spears in it!”

Dan: “And the twist with her, which I won’t say out loud, is just ingenious.”

So. Reality. It apparently has big tits.

I find it fascinating that Gillen proclaims himself an expert on spotting implants. He reminds me a bit of the cis men who proudly bleat about their ability to “spot the tranny.” What is interesting to note is that the model of breasts used for Jeanette is in fact quite common throughout the game, to the point where it’s clear that (implants or no) they are simply Troika’s vision of “breasts” en toto. Jeanette is indeed a character, and one that I actually like, along with her unmentioned sister Therese. While embodying certain cliches, the pair of them do present some interesting characterisation that transcends them with the power of each woman’s personal history.

Now, note how I could discuss that without speculating about the nature of Jeanette’s bosom? But why does all of this talk of cup sizes and so on become relevant? Well, it’s because of another fact. Gillen says no one in Santa Monica (an area of the game that is relatively self-contained for most of its opening acts) has “a cleavage” like Jeanette’s. Unless he got out a mental measuring stick, I’d have to dispute this.

You see, this game includes sex workers, lots of them.

And this is where pocketwatches begin bending over trees, melting.

Truest Blood

All over Santa Monica you find scantily clad women mincing about, fitting the perfect stereotype of the ‘streetwalker.’ For 40 dollars, your character can pay them to wander off into some alleyway with them and suck their blood to replenish their essence. Realistic, no? Quite mature. You wouldn’t find that in the Sims. But that’s not all. You see, in VtM:B, whose blood you suckle upon matters. The game makes very explicit that the blood of sex workers and the homeless (yes, they’re there to add ‘maturity’ as well) is inferior. If you play as a vampire of the noble and upper class Ventrue clan, you will actually vomit if you drink the blood of either.

It would act as a commentary on classism if this was shown to be entirely in the heads of Ventrue and other elitist vampires. But it isn’t; it’s instituted as a game mechanic. Even the wild haired anarchist vampire Smiling Jack waxes gleefully about how good the blood of a PhD tastes. This reification, aside from feeling very strange, has the entirely expected knock off effect of imputing an intrinsic inferiority to the homeless and to sex workers.

Each group is interspersed among the other random NPCs mindlessly milling about the darkened cityscape as a little bit of ‘flavour.’ And that’s what the sex workers and homeless are in this game. Flavour. It wouldn’t be mature without them, of course, and so they stand on the game-scape like poorly painted theatre props. But sex workers say naughty things, so this is a mature and honest world.

The invisibility of sex workers in this game is of a rather interesting sort. They, like most truths about women in society, hide in plain sight. They are there in Bloodlines, but they are truly not there. Masquerading as the truth about the ‘dark’ side of society are these nameless, samey, cliched street sex workers who are cast as being objectively inferior human beings.

Ten Guineas

Like most games of this sort, there is a modding community. Indeed, Bloodlines was infamously shipped in poor condition and has been restored to playable vigour by a dedicated community that created their own repair patches. Along with that extensive labour of love came other mods, one of which caught my eye as I was browsing.

Take a look at this. In particular, take a look at some of the comments from Bloodlines players.

Rofl well lets face it if they where gorgeous they would be in the porn industry not Pros. XD

.

I like how you made them graphically better, but still kept the ugly look.

Prostitutes should always be women who are on the verge of being attractive, but have tons of minor flaws.

So, what do we have here? What I find intriguing is the way the ‘truth’ is manipulated in games like this. Who are sex workers in a ‘truthful and honest’ game? Is this the sex that Mr. Gillen spoke of that could be described as such? One wonders where these young men in the comments section of ModDB got their ideas about how sex workers ‘should’ look.

Thus at last we stumble onto the real meaning of ‘reality’ here. It is hyperreality. Reality that, in the words of sociologists Laura Desfor Edles and Scott Appelrouth, has always already been reproduced. Put another way it is ‘reality’ that makes no reference to the real world yet purports to do so. While the postmodernists who gave birth to the term would howl at the idea that there is a real world, I contend that for sex workers there most certainly is, and that Bloodlines does not present it. In its place is a different truth written by white, cis, and middle class men based on what they think they know about the gritty realities of sex work and then present it as a courageously told and daring realism.

What is even more interesting is how these male gamers wish to modify that hyperreality further to better fit their stereotype of what a sex worker ‘should’ look like and be. To what are they making reference, precisely? Real women? It does not seem so. Rather, it is the streetwalker from countless movies and television shows, the woman heels up in a dumpster on CSI, or themodern damsel in distress that Richard Gere saves with his expense account. The Bloodlines vision of sex workers is a copy of all the above.

To use another ten guinea word from the often insufferable canon of postmodernism, this is a simulacrum of sex workers. Simulacra are copies with no true original, something that- I would contend- float beyond lived reality while able to pass themselves off as representations of that reality.

To return to Edles and Appelrouth:

As we have seen… hyperreality [refers] to this state when the distinction between “reality” and the model or simulation is completely dissolved. In the condition of hyperreality, simulations stand in for– they are more “real” than– reality; the map of the territory is taken for the territory itself.

And I might add, when the map is deemed insufficiently “accurate” a gamer will make a mod to “remedy” that fact.

The Pearl in my Eye

Dragon Age: Origins is another game released to cavalcades trumpeting fanfare about the grit and realism of their title and another game that presents a hyperreal vision of that reality that cannot be excused by its fantasy setting anymore than Bloodlines could be forgiven due to its supernatural themes.

The City Elf origin’s treatment of rape, for instance, is a lengthy and bloodsplattered caricature of patriarchy that strains mightily to immerse you in the sanguinity of its mature bona fides and yet fails to tell a story that coheres with any kind of reality. Real life rapists are rarely cackling moustache twirlers like Lord Vaughan, the ringleader of his posse of overtly misogynist gang rapist guards. We are presented with a vision of the rapist as a thoroughgoing, unlikable human being walking around with a neon sign saying “Uncouth Misogynist!” over his head.

That’s the hyperreality of sexism in society that too many men still think they see.

The reality is that rapists have included “nice men”, “likeable men”, men who “believe in equality” and so on; that people who claim to adhere to even feminist ideals are still very often sexist in ways overt and covert. The Origin here ‘deals’ with rape in a manner none to dissimilar from how Bloodlines ‘deals’ with sex workers. A distinct vision of reality as a bloody escape from the quotidian is passed off as mature and real.

Finally we come to what is nearest and dearest to me about these critiques: the Pearl. When your character visits this brothel she has the option of asking the madam for a bit of time with one of the sex workers there. Aha, this must be mature realism. I toyed around with the options and settled on asking to be “surprised.” I was then presented with an array of sex workers to “choose from” which included several ‘“Female” Companions.’

Could this possibly end well?

I chose one- the auction block or meat market atmosphere of all this ‘simulation’ was not lost on me- and slept with her to see what would happen. In a short cinematic before each session you’re treated to the sex worker lounging on the bed in their underwear making a quip before the scene fades to black. For the trans sex workers, the ones whose gender was called into disrepute by the quotation marks put around ‘female’ in their floating text nameplates, there was often a lot of making light of what is actually a very serious trauma for many trans women: revealing that we are trans in a situation where power is thick in air around us. As she lounges there she is shown talking in a deep and clearly male voice set, the sight of a bulge in her panties, and some quip about how the player ‘shouldn’t act surprised.’ It’s a reiteration of the old ‘deception’ trope about how trans women deceive cis men into bed with them, revealing their genitals as sort of a “gotcha” surprise.

In that moment I realised this was what Bioware thought of me.

Much work has already been done on the nature of ‘lenses’ as held and espied through by the powerful. That is what hyperreality is, fundamentally, a lens through which the lived reality of the less-powerful is warped and distorted. What makes this pernicious is that the distortion is then presented as the real. The ‘easter egg’ style gags with the trans sex workers at the Pearl were clearly meant as ‘mature’ jokes for a ‘mature’ audience that could handle this ‘reality.’ One wonders if Mr. Gillen would also have said we could “do nothing but applaud” this “honest” recounting.

In all of these settings we see a common, bright line of a thread. Rape survivors, trans people, sex workers, the homeless, are not agents. They do not speak with much of a voice except the ventriloquy of the powerful. As I saw that trans woman in Dragon Age sprawled out on the bed in her underwear I saw exactly what cis men want to see when they look at me and my sisters. The forbidden pleasure, the easy fuck, the fantasy. The joke.

And this is “reality.” This is grit, and this is maturity.

Yet where are we?

______________________

This post will appear on The Border House shortly as well.

In my recent article for The Border House I took on a number of the arguments made by a few starry eyed technophiles in favour of ending the practise of online anonymity. This is a significant issue for me that, in its many facets, presents me with the ultimate intersectional landscape on which to grow my ideas about interpersonal politics. In other words, it is very easy to talk about sex, race, power, class, and a range of issues surrounding both individual and group behaviour (group psychology and sociology), identity, and just plain old techno-geekery. It touches on a myriad of issues that are important to me.

What follows is a refinement of what I wrote for The Border House and an expansion of it.

I.- Setting Information Free(?)

It is very much worth mentioning that the central idea behind the anti-anonymity advocate’s vision is the firm belief that the death of anonymity will allow information to flow more freely. The reality, however, is that the end of anonymity means a significant lever of personal control will be wrenched away.

To explain what I mean by this I should go into greater detail about the nature of the information being hotly debated at the moment. Invariably the two pieces of information most prized by the Zuckerbergs and their ideological fellow travellers are, in order of importance: legal names and recent, tasteful photographs. This is what I’ve long referred to as “driver’s licence info” and it is information of a very particular and discrete (if not discreet) type. Driver’s licence information actually has very little to do with your personality and who you are as a person. Such information can, in the case of some, affirm who they are (such as in the case of us trans folk) but even that is only the result of the primacy placed on this otherwise relatively un-telling data.

The reason it is so vitally important, the reason it is fought over like the bloodied scrap of earth it is, is because people in power have made that information a matter of life and death.

A name is what you decide to call yourself, and secondarily what others agree to call you. The ‘legal’ codification of it was merely a forerunner to the 20th century invention of serial numbers which are used to ‘identify’ us ever more finely as the owner of a legally sanctioned identity. Legal names are the foundation of this particular form of identification and are the essence of it. Their legality arises from governmental sanction, but it says nothing immediately genuine about who you are. The reason my own name speaks so powerfully to me is because I chose it. I sought to have it legally recognised because in our society where legal names are gold standards and wherein we must all have one, I felt the most self-empowering thing I could do would be to choose it. So indeed I have and my name is now recognised at various levels of officialdom.

But it was no less mine and no less true to me when it lacked legal recognition. It was my name from the moment I chose it in the company of a dear friend as I tepidly set out to claim a name as my own for the first time in my life. If anything my old legal name actually signal-jammed a good deal of truth that may have eminated from me years sooner, and equally blocked a lot that I might have otherwise taught myself. Obviously my old name was not solely responsible for this– a welter of other social conditions played their parts– but it had a starring role to play. We can discuss and debate the particulars but the fundaments of the matter are these:

My old legal name hid far more than it revealed, hindered more than it helped, and stifled far more than it liberated.

In other words it was actually an impediment to the free flow of information for it to be known and in the public record. It was an obstacle to me forging my own identity, right up to the multiple legal rigamaroles I had to endure in order to change it publicly.

Forcing me into a particular ‘legal identity’ closed doors, it did not open them. Who, precisely, is Mark Zuckerberg to adjudicate on which name is a person’s true name? These legal names are important, yes, but only for the same reason that, say, the institution of marriage is important: so many unjust privileges are bound up in it that we cannot help but pay close attention to its use. For precisely that same reason control of that information must remain in the hands of those with the least power. More broadly, it should remain in the hands of those who are the rightful adjudicators of such information: the people themselves.

II.- The Keys of Truth and Who Holds Them

The crux of this battle is, in essence, ‘who decides?’ Zuckerberg and his kind suggest that it is the powerful who should, in Platonic beneficence, decide. This is again a very basic question of the powerless versus the powerful.

For Zuckerberg, an end to anonymity would mean a world that was, not too coincidentally, like Facebook. Leaving aside the rather obvious bias that incurs in thinking this an ideal way to run the world, there is also the fact that it presumes much about anonymity that simply isn’t true.

It is a truism that anonymity online leads to nasty behaviour that one might be more circumspect about otherwise. But although this idea is certainly true to a point, it neglects something very fundamental: there is nothing about the ways  in which people online are cruel to each other that is inherent to the space. Racism, sexism and every other form of prejudice, indeed, predate widespread use of the Internet. In some cases by millennia. The fault, dear reader, lies not with the websites but with ourselves.

The other failed assumption about anonymity is that it is only ever used for nefarious purposes. While it is true that there are people who behaved boorishly that might not have but for a web handle, it is equally true that there are many people online whose powerful writing and art would not be available to the world without the gift that anonymity provides. We return to the issue of how the death of anonymity is actually an information jammer rather than a signal booster. Countless survivors, PWD, and a variety of other folks would not be able to share the wealth of information they have to give without the ability to hide their driver’s licence info.

And it is here that we return to the difference between driver’s licence information and the information anonymous people often provide.

III.- Names, Faces, and Self

If I knew the name and face of any of several bloggers or commentors I’ve read who spoke eloquently and movingly about sexual assault, say, I would know very little about them that was useful and material to knowing who they were as human beings. I would know very little about what they would have to add to store of human knowledge, I would know nothing of their experience. All of the above are precious, the kinds of irrationally powerful, emotional, affecting pieces of knowledge and wisdom that help to add more definition to the tapestry of humanity.

A legal name and a face do nothing of a kind.

They are as bland and even lifeless as the ID cards they are so often printed on. My legal name only has soul because it is a name I personally choose to attach to a constellation of things about myself that I have forged. My activism, my work, my love, my commitment, my speeches, my writing. My legal name is like a desktop shortcut to all of the foregoing, and in this lies its value.

Exposed naked in absentia of all of that, however, it tells you nothing about me that is vital to my spirit. What it does do is enable to you stalk me. It gives you a headstart on visiting violence into my life if you are so inclined, or otherwise intruding into it in threatening ways.

This is, perhaps, at the heart of my puzzlement about the Zuckerbergs. To them, the gold standard of information is actually this very reductive system of ID codes that says nothing about the people to whom they belong. I am certainly not degrading the beauty of a name, but again in isolation a name and picture do not say much about the human being behind them. I can actually get to know a person quite well without knowing their name, and I have had life-saving and meaningful discussions online with people I will never meet, whose legal names and faces I will never know. Yet they revealed, in confidence, much more about themselves than those two bits of information would ever have shown me.

Quality information that, when taken together, formed a picture of a human spirit.

It was precisely their ability to shed the driver’s licence information that made them able to bring that spirit into sharper relief, and in so doing disseminated information that was thousands of times more valuable. To put it in those cold business terms, the value add was considerable.

An article like this wouldn't be complete without ethereal pictures of humans made up of wiremesh and numbers. Don't you hate it when that happens to you online?

IV. – To Know Good From Evil 

There is also the question of whether or not having one’s face and name known deters one from committing harassment or worse crimes. Again the often marginalised and disregarded experience of women proves immeasurably useful here.

For the armies of women sexually harassed on the job, they know the name and face of the perpetrator(s). It does not make the situation easier to deal with, it does not make it less complicated emotionally and spiritually, it does not reduce its impact, and it does not guarantee justice. Many women are also raped by men they know– ask them if knowing their rapist has made it any easier for them to find justice, any easier for their community to mete out the proper punishment, any easier to stop him from raping again.

The conviction expressed by anti-anonymity advocates is that only the mask of anonymity allows bad people to do bad things online. They are bigoted harassers only because their names cannot be attached to their prejudice.

The problem with this line of thinking is twofold: one, it assumes all prejudiced people are ashamed of their bigotry. Many are quite unapologetic, and the reason for this is problem number two- most prejudiced people do not consider their views to be prejudice. They use any number of euphemisms and circumlocutions for their hate: ‘common sense’ ‘rationality’ ‘political incorrectness’ ‘sanity’ ‘the natural order’ ‘the way things are’ ‘the un-PC truth’ ‘the real world’ and so on. One could fill a book with these dissembling phrases. But the simple psychological point is: if you do not see yourself as doing anything wrong, why would having one’s name attached to it make it harder to do?

One significant operation of power here is that the privileged get to define what constitutes harm to the relatively less privileged. Whites get to decide what is and isn’t racist, cis men get to decide what is and isn’t sexist, and so on. Predictably, many except the most morally stalwart will seek to define the prejudices in question in their own interests; whatever they are doing at a given moment never fits their personal definition of bigotry.

Thus, anti-anonymity advocates are committing a very basic fallacy when they suggest that people will be less stalkerish, less creepy, less prejudiced, less asshole-ish to each other online if only we all knew each others names. They are making the assumption that prejudiced people espy a target, recognise their full and equal humanity in all of its glory, then consciously decide to ignore it and act contrary to the decency this otherwise calls for.

The trouble is, however, that people who stalk and harass do not see their targets as human to begin with.

People who bully others or are otherwise abusive already have trouble understanding the humanity of the people they attack.

The sociological model used by the Zuckerbergs and their fellows is one that presumes bullies and bigots could only ever be inveterately evil moustache twirlers who, in full consciousness, see their targets as human beings and then, with equal consciousness and intent, decide to disregard that humanity. This is not how prejudice works except in extremely rare cases. Most bigots are ‘sincere’ in the sense that they genuinely do not see themselves as doing anything especially wrong. It is why we have such lengthy and painful arguments with bigoted people that turn around the maddeningly simple question of whether or not they are  being prejudiced at a given moment. Many men seem to have a hard time accepting, for example, that various forms of sexual harassment are not “a natural expression of male sexuality” to name just one rival interpretation.

Under these conditions, the idea that name-disclosure will severely curtail anti-social behaviour (to use the turgid euphemism now in vogue) is a fantasy.

V.- Power

This issue of power relations is central to understanding why the promises of anti-anonymists are delusional at best.

Consider David Brin, the man who wrote The Transparent Society. In it he predicts a coming future where, if we the masses play our cards right, all personal information will be free and it will actually enhance, not curtail, our freedom. As the Amazon.com review says by way of summary:

“While this has the makings for an Orwellian nightmare, Brin argues that we can choose to make the same scenario a setting for even greater freedom. The determining factor is whether the power of observation and surveillance is held only by the police and the powerful or is shared by us all. In the latter case, Brin argues that people will have nothing to fear from the watchers because everyone will be watching each other. The cameras would become a public resource to assure that no mugger is hiding around the corner, our children are playing safely in the park, and police will not abuse their power.”

No matter how many precautions one takes, this is simply not possible. The reason is that this even appears feasible is because it conceives of power only its most narrow and reductive form. The police have power, and non-police don’t. The government has power, and the masses don’t. Et cetera. This is a poor reading of power relations. Brin’s argument is that is the police control the security cameras, it’s totalitarian, but if “the people” control them, it’s virtual democracy. The problem is that as any social justice activist will tell you, not all powerful people wear uniforms and carry fancy titles. Not all power is expressed through the medium of legally enumerated privileges (i.e. the police/military monopoly on sanctioned violence).

When a parent beats a child, they are expressing power through dominance– even if the parent is poor, unemployed and otherwise poorly regarded socially. Same with marginal young men going “poofter bashing” in Australia or a working class man beating his wife in France or a no-name woman abusing an animal.

We can also point to street harassment, or sexual harassment in the workplace, or marital rape as expressions of power that are enacted between people who are not necessarily easily mapped onto a Powerful State versus Powerless Public schema. For white cis men it is easy to pretend that the only ‘real’ power holders are presidents, CEOs, generals, prime ministers, and emperors. For the rest of us we know that while those people hold real, terrible power, they aren’t alone in their ability to harm.

To wit I would not trust a random member of the public with my information any more than I would trust Citicorp or Prime Minister Stephen Harper or a police sergeant. When I was sexually harassed at a hair salon the man who was doing it was exercising considerable social power to keep me in place, polite, and fearful of what he might do if I refused his many insistent advances too harshly.

VI.- Conclusions

Anonymity is a lens that refracts and diffracts social behaviour. It also creates some social behaviour, this is true. But societal and structural prejudice are not among those behaviours. The most cursory glance at human history, conducted by even the poorest student, will make abundantly plain that human cruelty long predates the internet and has never needed anonymity to be either powerful or widespread. There are discrete occasions where anonymity has provided cover to the wicked. But there are many more occasions where anonymity was a tool for those who would fight the wicked.

Anonymity actually encourages the free flowing of information, it facilitates needful dissent, provides shelter in which one can think and create, and acts as a breeding ground for new identities. It is a means by which we can ensure, at least for a time, that we are not at the mercy of the powerful, and not at the beck and call of their ability to interpolate us through our assigned names.

Do I dream of a world where everyone knows everyone’s name and no one ever abuses that information? Yes. Do I believe such a world is even possible? Yes, I do. I’ve never shied from being called an idealist. But I also know we do not live in that world yet, and until we do, anonymity is a very powerful tool that- like any tool- can be misused. That’s no cause to banish it, however.

It is the job of fusty, addlebrained academic sorts to take things we all enjoy and take for granted, and then dissect it with the ponderous seriousness of a graying doyen of our particular art. Especially in the social sciences. Teasing out social messages, identifying wider imbricating discourses, and seeing patterns with relation to the media is usually a sombre affair filled with sad news. This is how this movie reinforces patriarchy, this is how this television show transmits transphobic messages, this is how our media is coarsening social attitudes, this is how this commercial is making us hate our bodies, and so on and so on. It is a rare, rare joy indeed when I get to turn my critical eye towards explaining how something in the media is positive in its influence on our society.

When a good friend of mine nudged me into watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic I internally scoffed. It sounded cute, and nothing was wrong with cute, but I’m a woman in her 20s, jet setting and on the go, kicking patriarchy’s ass and sipping skinny lattes while jogging between classes and speaking engagements. What use did I have for girl’s television anyway? What’s more, it was probably the usual problematic pap encouraging girls to be docile, quiet, restrained and feminine in a deeply unnerving way, another Cult of Pink devoid of all that can be good about growing up.

To say that I was dead wrong on all counts is an understatement.

The Sociologist as Children’s Hero?

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic began to arrest me when I realised that the main character was a bookwormish unicorn named Twilight Sparkle who was a serious minded, organised, knowledgeable student with a profound magical talent, proud of her tutelage under Princess Celestia– the benevolent ruler of Equestria– who’s known far more for her wisdom than her beauty it seems. The pilot episode finds Twilight learning several lessons that I would not only feel comfortable with my future daughters learning, but I’d actually fall over myself to get them into this programme. Twilight had to learn the power of friendship, yes, a rather old and clichéd concept in children’s programming. But what sets MLP apart is both how this was done and with whom it was done.

Twilight Sparkle expressing pony values.

Twilight Sparkle is sent to Ponyville by Celestia to make friends as Celestia worries for her star pupil’s social skills. But the plot does not revolve around Twilight dulling her intellect to become a social butterfly; far from it she learns her to use her talents relationally, as a member of a diverse group of ponies who all have distinct skills. She learns a group ethic; teamwork, in other words. One of the show’s most heartwarming messages is that you cannot always do great things alone; this message is a beautiful, at times subtle, contradiction of the selfish ethic of heroic individualism that has become like a cancer on our society. It is not just a paean in one episode, but rather a theme underlying every single one. It is the language through which the programme is expressed.

In all of this, Twilight’s skills and intellectual acumen are not blunted but become essential to her friendships. Her friends love her for who she is and are proud to know the “smartest Pony in Ponyville.”

I rather love Twilight Sparkle—when having her first slumber party she used a reference book on the subject to help her organise it. She is portrayed as an intellectual, she always lives somewhere surrounded by books—I envy her library. She is readily portrayed as a capable leader, a (community?) organiser, and maven of the world’s lore always ready to teach the ponies some esoteric fact. But perhaps the bit that really melted my heart was that Princess Celestia told Twilight to deliver a report about friendship every week, relaying her “findings.”

That’s right, Twilight Sparkle is a budding sociologist. I was sold.

Meet the Ponies

“Sold” is, perhaps, a very apt term. The entire programme is a gigantic advertising vehicle for Hasbro’s line of toys. This made me uncomfortable with both watching it and writing this piece. I do not like shilling for corporations, to be quite sure. But this show, I felt, was so good in terms of its messages that it warranted comment from me. People are watching it, liking it, and given its communalist, empathetic, and even feminist messages, I think this is fundamentally a good thing, irrespective of Hasbro’s profits.

Twilight’s friends present young girls with a range of character archetypes, none of them evoking what sociologist Raewyn Connell called ‘emphasised femininity.’ Emphasised femininity is particularly that dominant form of femininity oriented particularly to the interests of men, a femininity that reproduces women’s subordination to them. While some of the ponies are “girly” none are in any sense subordinate.  Pinky Pie is perhaps the most girly of the lot, with her giggles and pink, bouncy, almost maddeningly ebullient character. But she is more complex than she first appears, her quirkiness and oft-remarked-upon randomness actually seem to hint at the fact that she thinks differently. Indeed, she saves the day more than once.

Rarity is another pony, a unicorn, who seems at first blush to be a stereotype. She is the beauty queen of the lot, preening her appearance and so forth. But she owns her own business, a boutique where she plies her passionately pursued trade of clothesmaking. What’s more she is not purely vain, but rather someone who—in my view—appreciates beauty and elegance. She presents an image of glamour without the objectifying restraint that normally accrues to that image. When her love of beauty gets in the way, it’s the other women who talk her out of it and teach her to be less self-absorbed.

The other ponies are all, in various ways, athletic, rough and tumble, hardheaded and practical. Rainbow Dash’s strengths lie in her physical abilities as a flying pony, and her job—clearing the sky and helping to change the weather—is avowedly physical. Her distaste for and outright contempt for femininity is a marked part of her character. The same can be said for Applejack, who speaks with a Southern twang and runs a farm. She does a roaring trade selling apples and apple products, and is also unafraid of getting her hands…er… hooves dirty.

Fluttershy is the final pony. Her quietude and motherliness is also a feminine stereotype but she is, in my view, handled very well. She is given opportunities to overcome her meekness, find strength to raise her voice and her fists… er… hooves, and to learn more about herself over the course of the programme.

The point of the foregoing is to suggest that we are presented with various modes of gendered expression here, with Applejack and Rainbow in particular drifting far away from the various tropes of femininity. Far from being snapped out of it, they remain powerful characters in their own right.

Community, Diversity, and Pony Equality

Throughout the programme there are numerous little things that one notices which are of interest. All authority figures are women, ponies (the vast majority of whom are female) are shown as being capable of all manner of jobs—whether typed masculine or feminine. An entire episode revolves around the virtues and pitfalls of scientific empiricism. Unicorns can, apparently, specialise their magic in subjects like math.  All of the characters themselves, what’s more, are both flawed and funny. This is crucial; patriarchal media usually denies women the personhood that would enable us to be represented as flawed human beings and/or comical characters.

Some male characters in the programme, like Spike, Twilight’s baby dragon assistant and secretary, are shown to actually enjoy things that are typed as feminine. Rarity saves the day by using her skills to help a male river serpent who was rather proud of his hair, for example.

These are by no means indications that the show is perfect. It can certainly be picked apart with a finer toothcomb than I freely admit I’m using at the moment. However, it is my feeling that in general this programme presents a rather positive series of images for young women. This is a world that is made up almost exclusively of women characters who are in no way defined relationally to men, motivated by them, or otherwise orbiting them. Their goals are often noble and relating to hard, important, and often physical labour. Each pony uses her various skills to help the group, or help the wider community. Major events are shown as communal affairs where everypony (yes I used that word) does her part. The whole of Ponyville comes together for events like changing the seasons, which is something done manually in this intriguing fantasy world.

Understanding the feelings of others is part of the show’s empathetic marrow; but so is not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by the needs of others. One of the historic problems we as women have faced is that, unlike men, we are called on to care for others but always at our expense if necessary. We are not, as sociologist Carol Gilligan pointed out, often empowered to include ourselves in the universe of needs we must tend to. In MLP, by contrast, navigating the balance between one’s own needs (self-care) and the needs of others is important. It is learning to achieve this balance that Gilligan identifies as the road to maturity for those women who think in relational ways.[1] Presenting it to young girls can only be good for their self definition.

One interesting example of this balance is how Twilight Sparkle, as a powerful mage and otherwise brilliant pony, learns how to show off her talents and take pride in them without being unkind to others in the process. Rather than teaching girls to be silent and bashful about their skills, the programme shows that there is a middle path—complicated but navigable—to showing the world what they can do with pride and dignity.

The fluffy messages of peace, love and understanding are sappy and cheesy… and yet I love them to bits. It actually made me feel quite good to realise that I’d not become so jaded that I couldn’t dance along to the show’s jaunty theme song. This is not a perfect show by any means, but it constitutes what I feel is a very good start to producing less problematic television. Perhaps the worst moment for me was when Rarity fantasised about marrying one of the few male ponies we see in the show. This was more than a little eyeroll inducing, and a none too subtle reminder that the only permissible sexuality is heterosexuality. But the show remains largely free of men inhibiting the mass of women ponies, and their goals and desires have much more to do with their individual talents than with achieving something for or otherwise in relation to a male character.

The range of archetypes presented to young girls is very important here. The fact that I found myself in Twilight Sparkle, even as a radical feminist, is perhaps very telling. I would certainly not go so far as to say that there is a pony for every personality here, but it should not be difficult for a range of girls to see bits of themselves in each. There’s ample room for the girl who won’t be quiet and is more comfortable climbing trees than playing with Barbie dolls. But crucially, the spread of characters accommodates the many girls who are comfortable doing both. It shows that there need not be a tension between what is socially typed as masculine and feminine, that you can pick and choose what you want to do and who you want to be based on your own desires and feelings, and not just on whether something is correctly gender-typed.

Is friendship magic? I… am going to have to say, in my professional opinion, that… yes, it is.

Endnote:

Hasbro’s marketing strategy with regards to My Little Pony, as well as the unexpected surprise that came in the form of young het men enjoying the show, are discussed beautifully and engagingly by web designer and marketer Sabrina Dent on her blog here. The lecture is worth watching and is quite funny.

I also very much encourage my readers to see what Lauren Faust herself, the creator of this reboot of MLP, had to say about her show on the Ms. Magazine Blog. It is indeed very heartening to learn she’s a feminist and that I read her intent so well (I’d not seen this piece until after I published today’s blog post).

On February 19th, shortly before Syria’s Arab Spring uprisings began, an American-born Syrian lesbian named Amina Abdullah Araf launched “A Gay Girl in Damascus.” Araf had been posting comments and debating Middle Eastern politics online for years, but created her own space at the urging of Paula Brooks, co-founder of the news site “Lez Get Real.”

Araf’s blog featured her erotic poetry and her coming-out story—risky material since homosexuality is illegal in Syria. She also spread news of the government’s brutal crackdown on protestors, prompting Time.com to call her “an honest and reflective voice of the revolution.” In late April, Araf claimed that Syrian security forces visited her father’s home and accused her of “conspiring against the state,” “urging armed uprising,” and “working with foreign elements.” Subsequent posts found Araf “going underground,” although she was still able to “encourage other women in Syria to be more upfront” via an email interview with cbsnews.com. Last week, a cousin posted a dramatic account of Araf’s abduction by three armed men. Like the rest of “Gay Girl in Damascus,” that entry is now unavailable to the public.

Because they’re human beings, members of the LBGT and progressive blogesphere took to Twitter, Facebook and petition sites demanding information and protection for Araf. Days later, the blogger’s “Catfish”-style caper unraveled due to skeptical tweets from an NPR reporter; news of fake photos on Araf’s Facebook page; and an unnerving interview with a Montreal woman “Araf” had seduced via Facebook. On Sunday, The Washington Post revealed “Araf” to be Tom MacMaster, a white 40-year-old from Virginia who was raised a Mennonite and attends a graduate program at the University of Edinburgh.

At this point, MacMaster should have just said, “I’ve come down with a terrible case of white, male privilege. Please medicate me.”

Let me explain this very plainly: As a trans, queer woman of colour who writes authoritatively about her experiences I am very directly affected by the aspersions cast by this hoax. My words have power only if you believe them.

Now, this is hardly to claim that this little plague of white cis het guys in women costumes are the sole cause of all doubt and derision cast on those of us women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, PWD who speak out and speak loudly as we testify to our truths. That is certainly not the case. But they play so very deftly into the hands of that rash of men who say that there are no women on the Internet and that everyone claiming to be is really some creepy neckbearded guy in his mum’s basement. It gives a very powerful excuse to people who want to ignore us, erase us, marginalise us further, and another reason for them to simply shut down their minds whenever they read words of power from those the mainstream media almost never listens to.

In impersonating women of colour and queer women, the two fools behind Gay Girl in Damascus and Lez Get Real have done immeasurable damage with their high profile ‘outings.’ When so many of us out there are not listened to, are not given interviews with Time Magazine and CBS News to tell our stories in our own voices, what these two men have done is given every reason to news corporations to be even more gunshy about taking sources seriously if they do not come through the “proper channels.” It was likely as not a battle for some reporters to get their bosses to seriously accept ‘Amina’ as a credible interview subject, for instance. Now it will be an impossible battle when a real woman of colour has something to say to the mainstream press.

Leaving Evidence

This obviously affects me very personally—the informal testimony offered on blogs in the trans-sphere have been lifelines to many people in need and tell stories, give analysis, and produce knowledge that the cis majority would do well to take seriously. These hoaxes, yet one more grievous harm perpetrated on us by white cis men, make that needful aim that much harder to achieve. In a recent paper I penned for my Transgender Studies seminar, which a leader in the political science field has recommended for publication, I made a very powerful argument for the inclusion of trans people’s blogs as credible sources of empirical data about transgender experience, reality, and engagement with widespread academic and political falsehoods:

“These words matter, they are more than anecdotes (a term often used to dismiss and devalue the empirical text of peoples’ spoken experiences), more than ‘merely subjective.’ They testify to a truth only trans people can know and that is eminently open to sociological Verstehen: how trans people interpreted and understood their own lives. If these words rattle one’s marrow, stir their passions, excite anger, sadness, disbelief, then that must simply be accepted. Sociologists do not study dead matter, they do not study celestial spheres orbiting millions of miles distant, they do not study inert rock, they study living, breathing, joyous, wounded, screaming human beings with all the riotous subjectivity that this implies. If we do not embrace this, we have no discipline.”

‘These words’ refer to something I quoted from the blog of the peerless little light. I know her personally, but she keeps her identity under wraps for the same reason any outspoken trans woman of colour might in a patriarchal society like ours. Because of that necessary self protection, I will more than likely have to contend with an editor or some frightfully clever white male academic asking me “but how do you know she’s not a another Gay Girl in Damascus?”

A Reuters blog on the matter says the following of MacMaster in trying to distinguish him from professional journalists who’ve perpetrated hoaxes or plagiarised:

MacMaster has much more in common with the misguided activists who have fooled the public with tales of victimization in order to advance an agenda.

There you have it: the perspective of privileged people in journalism writ large. In that sentence is contained every single suspicion of white men, whether they are producers at Reuters or just an ordinary guy tooling around the Internet and stumbling onto some uncomfortable stories told by the oppressed. People with an “agenda” and “tales of victimisation” who are “misguided.” That the author of that sentence, who ends her article with the unbelievably condescending sentence “Let’s hope this is a lesson for the next person who thinks faking a story is a valid way to advance an agenda,” is herself a woman makes this all the sadder. But I’m quite sure it’s what her bosses want to hear.

She hangs the blame at the door of raceless, genderless “activists” with “agendas.” For the sake of balance she includes a conservative and Asian-American activist who perpetrated hoaxes in the mix. The clucking of her teeth is meant to chasten all of us, yet it is the white men (and one white woman in an earlier scandal) who have been faking on such a grand scale as MacMaster, who thought this was in any way a good idea. Those who are truly oppressed? We don’t need to make things up to get our points across. It is precisely because the privileged are not oppressed that these tourist fantasies even occur to them.

I do my best, even in my polemic writing, to avoid swearing and other especially vulgar expressions. Nevertheless this very, very particular kind of harm necessarily elicits a response from me that I feel, for the sake of honesty and fairness, must be committed to publication: Fuck you, Tom MacMaster.

A Psychology of Privilege: Externalising Guilt and Fantasy

But there is still more that is disturbing about all of this and it is the picture of the dark psychology of privilege that permeates too many young white men in this day and age. See this quote from MacMaster’s “apology”:

“I saw lots of incredibly ignorant and stupid positions repeated on the Middle East. I noticed that when I, a person with a distinctly Anglo name, made comments on the Middle East, the facts I might present were ignored and I found myself accused of hating America, Jews, etc. I wondered idly whether the same ideas presented by someone with a distinctly Arab and female identity would have the same reaction.”

This is utterly breathtaking in its utter failure to understand what was really going on there. At my school there is a very active network of organisations that support Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli atrocities mostly made up of people of colour, mostly Arab and Muslim. They are, as they will tell you quite balefully, routinely accused of hating America, hating Jews, and quite a few ‘etc.s’ besides as well. The women who speak out, a few of whom I am proud to know and call my friends, often find misogyny layered on top of the political ad hominem.

That being a person of colour and/or a woman produces some imperviously privileged standpoint from which to speak is a quintessentially white male fantasy. It’s something I see expressed again and again from men who think that “political correctness” or some other bogeyman-like spectre prevents “minorities” from being held to any kind of strenuous account, and that our skin colour, gender, sexuality, national origin or what have you makes us automatic authorities in the eyes of everyone who shan’t be questioned.

Only a white person and/or a cis het man could believe this in part or in whole because it comes precisely from an over-externalisation of their perspective rather than actually living as a woman, a person of colour, a Muslim person, a person with disabilities, and so on. They have never had to hear that they were “biased” because of their gender from people with power, as I have. I’ve been told by white cis men that by being trans, or being a woman, or being Latina, that I’m incapable of the objectivity they display when talking about all matters concerning race and gender. I’ve been told that I’m “angry” and “hysterical” because I’m a woman arguing for feminism and that I must necessarily hate men; I’ve had a few lads tell me that I’m “insane”—either because I’m trans or because I’m a radical feminist or both.

The idea that being anything other than a white cis het man gives you untold authority and power is a fantasy, a fiction developed through a very perverse kind of jealousy which arises only from utterly failing to truly listen when the oppressed speak. It is a fantasy that arises from a caricature that white men use to self-victimise, and it arises from the same place that the mythology of “political correctness” and “PC police” is spawned. The idea that the marginalised actually have incredible power that is often used to bludgeon white cis het guys for the slightest of infractions.

The idea that we are automatically taken seriously is absurd. The reality is that white men speaking for the oppressed actually have more credibility in the rarefied halls of power of our world precisely because that notion of their ‘neutrality’ is so treasured and readily accepted. Men can be unbiased when talking about gender, whites can be unbiased when talking about race, het cis people can be unbiased when talking about queer and trans people, and so on. There is no truth to this, only structural prejudice that allows people to think this tacitly. Down the years there have been many court cases where women (both white and of colour) who were judges on discrimination cases; the white male lawyers tried to get them to recuse themselves due to their intrinsic “bias.” Only a white man could fairly judge whether another white man has discriminated against someone, after all.

I will not belabour these issues further. It is enough to say that this is the merest glimpse of the truth that we see with our own eyes and live with our own lives.

MacMaster’s dangerous fantasy is one that I see time and again from white cis het guys who want their truths validated. Every time you hear some smart-aleck premise his forthcoming stupidity with “well, I may be a mere male but…” you’re listening to this particularly pernicious psychology in action. It’s self-deprecating nonsense premised on the idea that the marginalised are saying we are better or otherwise superior. White men project their own deeply engrained zero-sum, hierarchical thinking onto us and assume we must be using exactly the same framework.

Akiba Solomon’s article linked to an intriguing reprimand from Brian Spears, a white man, who tongue lashed MacMaster’s and any potential imitators quite ably. It’s worth reading in full but the gist of it is, as he put it:

Don’t co-opt the voice of a minority in hopes that people will take your writing more seriously, especially when you belong to the most privileged demographic group on the planet.

The truth is that the writing of white men is already taken very seriously because they are seen as human and not as white men by anyone except people well educated in the social and psychological forces behind that.

My Back Pages

My bookshelves tell a story. The oldest books I own, from back in my middle school and high school days, when transition was not even something I realised was possible, are something I look at from time to time with a sense of amazement. From fiction to non-fiction nearly all of them were written by white men. The sole nonfiction example was Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Nearly everything else, regardless of subject, was written by a white man. Of my vast collection of Star Wars novels only a small percentage were written by writers like Kathy Tyers or Kristene Kathryn Rusch. I never noticed this until I was in my early 20s and my feminist awareness began to blossom more fully than it had hitherto.

I bring up this anecdote to suggest that fundamental truth: white men are in no way silenced from speaking about whatever on Earth they want to. Whether it’s the Galactic Empire from Star Wars, the Japanese media, the historical accuracy of high school text books, the emergence of globalisation, or political atheism (all randomly selected topics from my oldest books) they’re very much accounted for on these subjects.

All Tom MacMaster and Bill Graber have done is make it even harder for me or anyone else from my milieu to compete with them, to say nothing of the material harm that MacMaster has caused to real Syrian LGBTQ people. One of the many things they and would-be imitators must come to understand is that no revolution worth having was ever initiated through the privileged making marionettes of the oppressed; that is merely what perpetuates oppression. The revolution will not be puppetmastered.

What gives me hope, however, is that neither I nor any of the rest of us who do speak out and know the real meaning of speaking truth to power, are going to shut up as a result of this. We will win through, I feel. It’s hardly the first time white guys have tossed flaming wreckage in our way, and it won’t be the last. But they won’t stop us.

It sounds a tad bit cheesy, yes, but for all of my snarky sarcasm and the like, I’ve always put a lot of stock in that gift from Pandora’s Box. It’s a precious resource in the trans community. So, what am I waxing all poetic about and what not? Well, this time around I’d like to solicit you all to fundraise for a charity near and dear to my heart– so much so that I’m actually working for them. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organisation for low income trans people of colour, has radical aims that dovetail with the themes I often speak of on this blog. It is hard to imagine a better organisation for me to devote my time and energy to. Indeed, it’s part of why I’ve been a tadbit too busy to write these days. But it is the Goddess’s work and it feels decidedly good.

On that note, this is our latest fundraising project:

I’ve been pretty busy helping with the organising and the fundraising that an event like this requires but for the moment I’ve been given a pet project and if any of my readers are interested in doing a spot of good then you can hop on over to Indie GoGo and check out our online fundraiser leading up to this gala. Please feel free to contribute, but if you don’t want to or are unable to, then I encourage you to pass the link along to any friends, colleagues, allies, and so on who may be interested. With initiatives like this every dollar helps.

My work here has been, in no small measure, interesting and a crash course in many things. But it has, above all, been a beautiful insight into the community that my sisters, brothers, and siblings have forged and of which I am proud to be a part. I’m not the kind of woman who is easily persuaded into advocacy and I would have never offered my blog as a place to help our fundraising efforts if I couldn’t say the word “our” with confidence apropos SRLP; if I didn’t feel a sense of ownership, a sense of community, I’d have never mentioned my blog. But I did so eagerly because SRLP isn’t just where I work. It’s a workplace where I can be out as a trans woman without the slightest second thought, and it’s a place where all of the markers of isolating distinction and discrimination do not count against you. A place where I could seek support from everyone on staff when I experienced a transphobic incident a couple of weeks ago.

In sum, I do believe in SRLP and what they do; they practise what they preach and I love them to bits. They are that rarest of organisations that will make my usually cold onyx heart melt and go all mooshy.

This is one of only a few nonprofit organisations that reflects the radical vision I have; radically gender equal and positive, feminist/anti-patriarchal, and as much as possible a non-hierarchical organisation that constantly militates against forces compelling them to sell out. As much as possible, I can say with confidence having seen things from the inside, we really do try to ensure that the trans community has ownership of this non profit and that we are never beholden to the powerful or the “great and good.” Small donations from (yes I’m using the PBS phrase here) people like you make that radical goal possible.

Okay I’m done being all sappy. If y’all are generous I may throw a slug comic up here soon when I get home. Thanks in advance.

~Quinnae