Monstrous Regiment

This diatribe by Paul McHugh, at one time Psychiatrist-in-Chief of Johns Hopkins University, against transsexualism is not news. But since encountering the text of it online last week, i have been pondering how to respond. I think the best response i can give is a line-by-line answer.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

McHugh is a gender essentialist. That is, he believes that at some point in our early development it is determined that we will be a man or a woman, and once this differentiation occurs it is complete, profound, and eternal. Furthermore, this differentiation is based on externally-verifiable clues; in cases of ambiguity an answer can be imposed on someone by society or by an expert with absolute certainty.

This external imposition has nothing to do with one’s individual experience; experience is squishy, unreliable, not to be trusted. Individual variation is seen as aberrance, which is most properly dealt with by being corrected in accordance with the proscriptive norm. For example, the woman who is not subservient or sufficiently maternal is aberrant and must be corrected.

This position is normative; it breaks the human experience down into categories by which individual experience and performance is given a value judgment as “normal” or “aberrant.” In other words, in the gender-essentialist view of the human condition, you are either a “normal man,” a “normal woman,” an “aberrant man,” or an “aberrant woman.”

This position does not recognize transsexualism. People who report an experience of gender incongruence between their body and mind are aberrant, in that we must be delusional.

Once that the gender essentialist declares that i am delusional, there is nothing i can say to him or her. The gender essentialist, confronted with my account of my experience which cannot be reconciled with his or her belief system, has chosen to resolve the dilemma by putting his or her hand over my mouth. So we know from this that the entire article will consist of speaking at transsexual women rather than speaking with us.

Prepare to be depressed. This is long, so i’m putting it behind a cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a filtered post in my LJ about it a couple of years ago, but i haven’t really made it public knowledge that i have an intersex condition. This may come as a surprise, but i don’t actually make it a habit to talk publicly about certain parts of my body. It was diagnosed at birth and i remember when i was eight attending a consultation with a surgeon who talked about ‘correcting’ it surgically.

Yes, i am intersex AND transgender. My secondary sex characteristics are pretty unambiguously male yet my identity is female. But the last couple of days i’ve been pondering the link between these two things.

All my life people have acted as though there is something off about me. Even before i began laser hair removal therapy, it was not uncommon for people i encountered on the street to gender me as female, even if i hadn’t shaved in a week. Then they’d look up at me or look again and ‘correct’ themselves or just look very confused. So, something about me sends ambiguous gender signals to people. I’ve long presumed that maybe i was giving off some kind of unconscious behavioral signal of my feminine gender identity. But what if it’s because i’m intersex?

The gestational estrogen exposure which caused my intersex condition was possibly responsible for the overall female shape of my face and body. People who meet me find it difficult to believe i’ve never taken hormone supplements. My height is about average for a woman, though i have a broad masculine upper body. It’s possible i smell female to myself and others, too; in this regard i’ve heard mixed accounts from different people close to me.

My voice, too, is ambiguous. I have been working with a voice training program my therapist gave me, and while i can speak in female registers without my voice straining or cracking, i have the vocal resonance of a man and comfortably sing tenor. Heck, i could write a long autobiographical post about my voice alone - i have never liked the sound of it and have tended to soften it to the point of whispering - but suffice it to say my voice has never helped convince anyone i was male or female.

I’m going to veer into controversial territory because i’ve been skating on the edge of it anyway. It’s one thing to wonder if my physical ambiguity is due to estrogen exposure during gestation, but quite another thing to wonder if that same exposure affects psychological ambiguity too.

There are those who advocate calling transsexualism an intersex condition. I’m iffy on this for two reasons. First, there is a wide variance in what brings people to where they will say they are transsexual; the desire or need to transition stems from many different things inside many different people, and i’m not comfortable supposing there is one single identifiable root cause.

Second, any proposed causality from biology to psychology is problematic. We can examine the brains of male and female cadavers and find statistical differences between them. But what causes those differences is unclear. Genes paint the shape of the brain in broad brushstrokes; beyond that the brain is shaped by experience. Without clear experimentation (which would be, to say the least, unethical) we don’t really know where to draw the line between nature and nurture.

But as my wife is fond of pointing out, when it comes to treating people with respect it shouldn’t matter whether these things are inborn or cultural. So i am not offering the question of, “Was i born this way?” in the spirit of then saying, “Because if i was born this way, then you should treat me fairly.” You should treat me fairly anyway, even if i have chosen something you don’t like. In the end it’s not scientific evidence that will end discrimination (the anti-gay right has been adjusting their religious argument to accommodate bio-psychological arguments) it is our account of what it is like to be us.

No, i’m just trying to understand why i am the way i am. 37 years of this and i don’t really think i’m any closer to understanding.

The officials who run the Miss Spain pageant have changed their eligibility rules so that mothers and transsexual women are allowed to compete.

It’s a strike for… equality?

Won’t it be a shining moment in transgender history when, say, three to five years from now, a galla wins the title of Miss Spain and goes on to have a huge public tussle with the people who run the Miss World pageant?

Eyup, i’m looking forward to it.

It’s kind of sad that the right to be equally objectified alongside women-born-women seems in some ways like a step up. I could write a lot here about the origins of beauty pageants, their fundamental heteronormativity, reinforcement of the male gaze, and, and let’s not forget that modern pageants exist to sell products by bathing suit companies. That stuff is not really what i want to write about today, and it’s easy enough to research if you care.

The average galla, like the average WBW, wants to feel that people think she’s pretty.

I don’t mean “hot” or “doable” or “sexy,” or “i’d hit that.” I’ve been told many times by numerous men that i am an acceptable recipient of their transitory lust — as long as i promise not to say anything to their wives. Few of them bothered to waste the air it would have taken to call me pretty.

So at this point in life i am not concerned about whether or not someone will invite me to bed. But do they think i’m pretty?

Prettiness is… i don’t know. I shouldn’t call it “validation.” It’s more a kind of acceptance, a kind i’ve been starved for my whole life.

I don’t know whether it’s something we’re taught while we’re growing up or if it’s just a reflection of a natural desire to belong and be accepted. It doesn’t matter; either way, it’s too often used as a way to manipulate girls.

It’s not that i think it would confirm that i’m a woman to be told i’m pretty. But most girls, i suppose, are told at least a few times while they’re growing up that they’re pretty; but your average galla, at least those my age, were never told it.

I think my mom said it to me once when i was 14, or at least something to similar effect. I had come out to her, and at first she kind of freaked out. One night, though, she showed me how to brush out a wig, and gave me a few other pointers on dressing and presenting a bit more femininely.

How can i express what that felt like after 14 years of being firmly repressed?

And how do i square this up with what many of my feminist friends have told me, of how it was drilled in their heads non-stop from the time they were small that they had to spend a lot of their time primping so they would look pretty? It is no surprise when WBW meet gallae and hear us “squee” because someone told us we’re pretty, and conclude that we’ve just bought into the social superficial nonsense surrounding femininity and have no idea what it’s really like. I can’t blame them; they were overdosed on the thing which we were starved of, and not only does either treatment make us all pliable it also divides us, causes us to mistrust each other.

Honestly, i don’t find it ‘liberating’ to spend more time in the morning making myself presentable, or to pay thousands of dollars (and cry many tears) to have facial hair removed so i will be more acceptably pretty. But it is ‘freeing’ in the sense that it means i do not have to continue to abide by the course that was set for me by god and country during the first two decades of my life. From my perspective, it more closely resembles the freedom to live life on my own terms.

I am jumping from the fire into the frying pan.

Last week i wrote about an issue close to my heart - the crisis facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

But i only told half the story, and left out perhaps the most important part; the part which is more difficult to talk about because it is shrouded in secrecy. That half of the story is this: who it is that actually commits the violence.

We know who the survivors are, by their scars, by their determination to move on, by their lives in the perpetual spotlight of being marked as Other. But so little is ever said about the ones committing the violence. We hear about who is assaulted and think we know all we need to know about the perpetrator. A woman was attacked? Probably done by a man. A gay man was attacked and peppered with slurs? Probably done by a straight person.

But this is far from the whole story, because most men have never attacked anyone, and most straight people have never attacked someone queer. What do we know about those who actually commit acts of violence or harassment, and why do they do it?

It was very easy to research the entry i wrote about the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic violence, exploitation, and harassment. But it is very difficult to find any information on the web about why people commit violence. I may have to actually — oh the horror! — go to a brick-and-mortar library for any answers.

Some time spent this weekend searching for a first-hand account of what was going through someone’s mind when they assaulted someone was fruitless. It’s possible that many perps even block this from their own conscious mind. Or its possible that the simplest reason of all applies — they did it because, straight up, they wanted to, and figured the relatively small risk of official sanction was worth it.

Psychologist Karl Jung claimed that we attribute our “undesirable” feelings and motivations to a part of our mind he called the Shadow, so that we can mentally detach ourselves from them and pretend they are not a part of us. Many people still attribute these feelings and motivations to the Devil. A while back i wrote in my LJ about the othering of perpetrators; it’s likely that many perps do this even to themselves in their own mind. “It was like someone else doing it through me,” or “i don’t really know why i did that, it’s not like me.”

That may account for the lack of personal accounts of committing violence; but it still doesn’t address the question of what is going through someone’s mind before they do it.

Criminal science and criminal psychology seem to mostly deal with finding out who has committed crimes. Even profiling does not seem to deal so much with what leads people to attack as it does with identifying characteristics which are likely to distinguish those who commit attacks. A criminal profile parses people into a list of things to look for, bits of demographic information and pieces of behavior, the kind of analysis that erases whole people from direct attention.

Google “criminal psychology” and mostly what you see are accounts of unusually heinous criminals: serial killers, sadistic kidnappers, that sort of thing. Not much on run-of-the-mill attacks like insulting and intimidating the queer kid every time you find him near his locker.

Serial killers appear to lack the part of the brain, which the rest of us have, which makes it possible to empathize with other people. So, they cannot conceive of the “thing” they subject to torture and murder as a conscious person who sees and feels the way they do.

But unless we’re prepared to believe that a fifth to a fourth of the population is psychotic and lacks the most basic ability to empathize, we need a better answer to why so many people set aside their empathy and lash out when they see the queer kid at his locker.

ETA.  Even appeals to neuro-psychology are incomplete and unsatisfying.  Why should lack of empathy lead to sadism? It does not logically follow that a missing or disordered part of the brain should lead to thoughts and actions being added.  And why should the drives and desires which appear be those of aggression?  Despite the stereotype of the ‘crazy person,’ people who are neuro-atypical tend to be in much more danger from others than they themselves represent.

The lack of satisfactory explanation is what drives feminists to conclude that acts of violence are primarily acts of will, driven by opportunity (”i can do that and get away with it”) and entitlement (”i have the right to do what i want, no matter who is put out in the process”); and furthermore, that they reflect a prevailing paradigm of silent, unspoken encouragement to violence against the out-class.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

Massachusetts lawmakers voted Thursday to block a proposed constitutional amendment that would have let voters decide whether to ban gay marriage in the only state that currently allows it.The narrow vote was a victory for gay marriage advocates and a devastating blow to efforts to reverse the historic 2003 state court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.

The proposal needed 50 votes to advance to the 2008 ballot. It got 45, with 151 lawmakers opposed.

from Mass. lawmakers block gay marriage vote

What a powerful statement. At first opponents (or rather, supporters of continued same-sex marriage) were talking about blocking the measure with procedural tricks. But this is so much more firm: the measure’s supporters (or rather, opponents of same-sex marriage) could not muster the support of 25% of the legislature.

Those who oppose same-sex marriage are no doubt going to try again, but this may well shut them down for good.

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

• 83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
• 40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
• 26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
• Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
• Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
• The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome.  When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.

I have a feeling that there is going to be an intense blogosphere backlash over the cancellation of the showing of “the Gendercator” at a GLBT film festival a couple of weeks ago, and just today, of Bitch’s performance at the Boston Dyke March.

It is being said that this is our doing. Or, if it isn’t our direct doing, it is our indirect doing because transfolk have colonized the lesbian community so thoroughly that lesbians now regularly act against their own interests and uphold surgically-altered men over their own kind.

Well, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that we’re… well… you know… kinda… a little bit… sorta… right. In which case, lesbians (and the rest of the queer community) have been colonized with the truth.

Either possibility has the power to explain both the Gendercator incident and the Dyke March incident.

The first position relies on the presumption that our experience is delusional, or that we have misinterpreted our experience or have been misled by others for their gain, or, worst yet, that our motivations are base or even downright evil. Did i miss any possibilities? So at the outset, we are wrong either because we are crazy, or because we are ill-informed and manipulated, or because we are evil.The first position erases what we have to say about our lives and the only strategies that come even close to dulling the pain we feel; the first position starts by silencing us, and goes on from there to demonize us.

If you think i’m crazy, or manipulated, or evil, what won’t you believe i am capable of?

If we’re right, then the matter is simple; it is simply the truth tending to win out. But our detractors hold that we are wrong; and, see, for a wrong idea to flourish and spread, it must be propped up by some form of injustice.  To maintain the insistance that we are wrong and they are right, they must offer increasingly sinister explanations for the flourishing of our viewpoint.

It might be that many in the queer community judge us to be not crazy, nor manipulated, nor evil. It might be that after hearing us describe what we have to go through to get through the day, that they listen and even come to feel compassion towards us. It might be that they think our detractors see the world in terms that are too simplistic. It might be that they have come to understand that it is wrong to silence and marginalize us (or themselves, or anyone). And if that’s the case, maybe the natural thing to do is to stand with us in solidarity against people who go out of their way to say things which hurt us.

As i told another galla today, someone i consider a close friend, these incidents suggest that, in the queer community, transfolk aren’t the underdog any longer. I want to sit with that thought for a moment. It’s not that we’ve “won,” but that we are actually respected by our friends and peers. It’s not my desire to see anyone’s contributions cut down and to that extent i’m sad about what happened to Catherine Crouch and to Bitch. Maybe we can make some good come from these events by having some discourse on how we can respect the voices and experiences of transpeople while at the same time allowing voices of controversy or unpopular inquiry.

And hopefully that will give us the chance to move on and take on our real foes for a change instead of spending so much energy arguing with ourselves.

So i’ve been making plans for weeks to go to the Boston Dyke March tonight. And in my inbox this morning i see that there is a last-minute letter-writing campaign to ask the Dyke March committee to disinvite the artist Bitch, who is scheduled to perform for us tonight, on account of her performances at Michfest and her stated approval (or non-disapproval) of their policy of excluding gallae. Others are planning to turn their backs to her during her performance.

I’m feeling a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it is really touching to see that so many in my community are willing and eager even to fight for my inclusion. But i also find it heartbreaking.

Despite what Bitch has done or said regarding MWMF, she has to be aware that the Boston Dyke March is explicitly galla-positive. It’s right there on the front of their webpage. I have heard mixed things from local gallae about how welcome they actually feel there, but the stated policy counts for a lot. Knowing about the policy (i presume), she has chosen to be here with us anyway.

So it seems to me that if she really hated gallae, she could have chosen to perform somewhere else tonight. Or, maybe she’s just an equal-opportunity opportunist, but i think that is an unfairly cynical thing to assume.

She’s been asked about the policy of exclusion at MWMF; i wonder if anyone has even asked her what she thought about the policy of inclusion at the Dyke March. Heck, if i get the chance, maybe i’ll ask her myself. Assuming, that is, the sight of dykes turning their backs on a dyke doesn’t break my heart so much i have to leave.

Suppose the committee disinvites her. Suppose she hears about the protest and stays away. Suppose she feels pressured into making a statement of support. Are any of these things victory? I don’t think our community wins by making one of our own feel they have to back down or silence themselves under pressure.

Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to see her leave here talking about having had a great experience in a community that welcomes and includes gallae? Having seen how a dyke community which includes gallae can be just as woman-affirming and healing and vital as the community she’s experienced at Michfest? Otherwise i’m concerned that she could leave here with a sour taste and see the whole thing as evidence that those who say gallae are here to undermine and sow seeds of discord are right.

I’m not saying we should back down. I’m saying that there’s a bravery in solidarity that goes beyond the bravery it takes to protest. Are things really so adversarial over this issue that this is now and forever an “us versus them” situation? I mean, protest is what you do when there is no hope that the other party will listen to you. If i’m just a hippy fruit-loop with delusions of compassion where it will never be, break it to me gently, will you?

ETA. Bitch is no longer scheduled to perform.  I don’t know any more than that; more as i learn it.