Archives for posts with tag: Justice

What is it about drag?

May 5, 2023 //
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A friend I’ll call G recently wrote an impassioned post about the experience of growing up female, that this is a unique thing that trans women somehow dilute. Her post included also argued that the sheer average size of biological males argues against their right to occupy biological female space. They are incapable of knowing the fears and joys of being female, from the perspective of being biologically female from birth in the world.

As cisgender humans, G and I are incapable of occupying the spaces of other genders. Our experiences don’t allow for that – nature or nurture – but we can empathise with others’ experiences. I can start to imagine the fears of women making their way through public spaces where they’re catcalled – fears that as a cis-presenting male, I don’t live with. I can imagine those fears and be with those who have them in their space without, for example, denigrating their lived experience. Stating it this way is, I admit freely, very harsh to my friend’s position – possibly harsher than it needs to be. With that empathy I can try to a better human, advocate, partner, and friend.

I also didn’t grow up suffering any kind of gender dysphoria, but I can empathise with those who experience it now – who spend every moment with the feeling that the space they occupy, the space assigned to them, the roles society puts them in are wrong – and argue to make their existences easier and more aligned with who they are. I don’t need to live their experience to trust their lived experience. I was reading today about Brianna Titone, a trans woman in the Colorado legislature. Her childhood dream was to work for the FBI and she remained closeted until she aged out of admission to the Bureau at the age of 37. I can barely imagine the pain that cost her.

From my perspective, it matters what those initial experiences imprint on a person, but those experiences are both internal and external and shouldn’t be legislated back into the closet.

Paraphrasing from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: We can’t know the inner experiences of other people, but we can know our own hearts and by this know the hearts of others. Not what their desires and needs and fears are, but the nature of desire and need and fear. (Hobbes presents this idea in the introduction to the Leviathan. The syntax is very old-school, but it’s four paragraphs worth reading.)

This is possibly the key to the argument. G knows the nature of her fears and needs and desires as she grew into womanhood – or does if she examines her own heart, just as I know mine. We can use that self knowledge to examine the fears and needs of those who grow in a body that doesn’t feel right. Or with desires that don’t align with what the so-called majority posits are the only legitimate paths for desire.

How do we make things equitable in the public square in the face of state after state legislating against trans existence? It’s truly fascistic, in my view, and sets the stage for a full rewrite of the sexual freedoms Americans have had since Griswold. Women are already suffering as a result of restrictions on procedures and medicines that are associated with abortion even if the mother’s ability to further bear children should she survive complications of a pregnancy gone awry. It’s a demonic state of affairs. A few years ago there was a case in Dublin where a woman’s pregnancy went septic – she was denied abortion and died as a result. In response, Ireland legalised abortion and at the time was seen as a latecomer to abortion rights in general. Since then, the US has gone backwards with alarming speed.

What does all of this have to do with trans rights? Good question. Affirming that a person has the right to determine where and how they are most comfortable in their body is one place – bodily autonomy is another. Gender affirming care is a phrase, like ‘woke’ and ‘political correctness’ that has been twisted out of all recognition. G has also argued that drag in general mocks femininity rather than embraces and exalts it. Was Barry Humphries, or Ian McKellen for that matter, mocking women? Do panto dames mock women by their very existence?

G has shared a point about drag being men in ‘woman-face’ and she’s not the only one of my friends to do so. What makes drag different than minstrel shows – Al Jolson singing Mammy in black face? The sidestepping of discrimination and thereby making fun of an underclass group is partially at the heart of each one. But drag has always seemed to me more celebratory of those things that make women different than men.

In considering the arguments against trans people, I’ve wondered if autism in a similar category as gender dysphoria? In both cases, societal and medical changes developments should make it more possible to live comfortably and successfully in the world than was possible ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I can hear a case that these are totally different – one is something that you can show in a medical diagnosis and is historically identified. And the other? Very much the same.

The main problem I have with my friends expressing anti-trans or anti-drag sentiment is that trans folks and queer people in general are in the legislative crosshairs in the US and elsewhere. And the last couple of years have seen a massive uptick in these things.

There are eight trans legislators in US statehouses. None in the US Congress. The silencing and outlawing a class of queer people is happening in at least half of the states with very few voices able to stand up on the other side. And when they do stand up, they’re often silenced. The case of Representative Zooey Zephyr in Montana comes to mind. She was ousted from her duly elected seat for speaking against an anti-trans bill and is still unable to return. The bill passed and was signed by the state’s republican governor.

I read the papers everyday and above the virtual fold, always, is something about the targets on the backs of gender non-conforming people. There’s the bill in Texas trying to legislate that people working for government dress to match the gender they were assigned at birth. (This is nothing new in Texas – I had a housemate 20 years ago who fought her previous employer, the Houston office of the Internal Revenue Service for the right to wear trousers to work. If I recall correctly, she had to take them to court.)

And the BBC reports that the Proud Boys (yes, the source of five seditious conspiracy convictions this week) are now targeting drag shows.

I’m not sure of the answers and I think my lack of certainty is me being played into a more fascistic position. I’m not active in drag (though I once dated the first drag queen to run for president, Joan Jett Blakk), and I’ve never watched Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Are a bunch of queer men dressing up and making their faces exaggerations of femininity problematic in ways that I as a queer-adjacent male can’t comprehend? Are we really that different, men and women (and all human points between and beyond), that we can’t bridge this divide without othering and criminalising a valued (or any) segment of the population, without devaluing any of us? It’s the devaluing of humans for something that’s inherent (heck, even if it’s for something as harmless as drag, that’s chosen) that gets me first, whereas othering people at all takes a piece of my heart and incinerates it while I still breathe.

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Categories Politics, Writing

My Jewish culture and representation

April 23, 2021 //
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My relationship to Judaism has always been weird. When my parents were still together (they split when I was 4), we must have observed many of the rituals in the home, even though Fullerton, CA was a long way from the New York and DC locales of the rest of our family and heritage. Why do I say we must have? My Bobe (my mother’s mother – second generation American) relished telling a story of some early visit we made to see her and Zade (my mother’s father, first generation – arrived from Ukraine in 1912 or so, I think). It must have been when I first visited them in DC as a walking, talking person (as opposed to a toddler). The way she told it, I walked around the table, and looked at the candlesticks and wine glasses and large pictures of a pair of ancestors from the shtetl, and asked in all innocence, ‘Are you guys Jewish?’ My grandparents found this hilarious.

Nowadays. Between then and now, I’ve gone through periods of greater and lesser connection. At the moment, I’m starting to learn a little about Yiddish culture and taking a Yiddish class online. It’s a period of greater connection, let’s say. Last week, I was listening to The Shmooze, a podcast from the Yiddish Book Center. The interview subject was Judy Batalion, a playwright and author from Montreal who recounted the sources of her latest book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos. She grew up knowing about Hannah Senesh, as I did – this one incredibly brave Hungarian Jewish woman living in Mandatory Palestine who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary, was captured, tortured, and killed by firing squad in 1944. Batalion was researching other such women and found an entire book published in Yiddish in the US in 1948 or so, which told of other such brave women. And that book sank into obscurity, and Szenes (to use the original spelling) became the synecdoche in Hebrew school history for all those incredible women. This book one book sent Batalion on her own path, resulting in a 500-plus page book on the subject.

In that Shmooze interview, Batalion makes the point that those women did what they did out of a certain necessity, and for the simple reason that they risked less than the men by doing it. Men who were caught would have their trousers dropped, because only Jewish men were circumcised then. The women and girls had often gone to school with the non-Jewish girls, so their Polish was that spoken in the general populous, not the Polish of the yeshivabuchers who went to schools within the shtetl an mostly spoke Yiddish and Hebrew.

And this got me thinking about how we think about heroes, about Israel and its very male leadership. And, oddly, I read today about a female-created female superhero, Miss Fury, who had a 10-year run that ended in 1951. Not the same as actual heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance, but categorically similar, in that Fury’s creator, June Tarpé Mills, is another woman whose work was subsumed by the mid-20th century’s habit of glorifying the masculine and shutting away all the women who dared.

I think there’s a group psychology that comes into play in groups that need to be rescued. And I fear diving into what the survivors of the Holocaust had to deal with who then moved into a world where they could actively defend a new homeland but knew that they hadn’t been able to defend their previous homes. I’m an armchair psychologist at best. But hiding the stories of those girls and women who ran explosives between the ghettos and went out on other missions against the Nazi occupation serves to make a monolith of all the victims of the Holocaust. If all were victims, then the ghetto uprisings, and subsequent liquidations, were anomalies, rather than the rule. (Sometimes you hear someone say, ‘If I’d been in Germany, I would have fought back. Why didn’t the Jews fight back?’ The answer is, We did.)

There are a lot of people who study these matters of language and culture and history who know these things better than I do. But there’s one connection to draw about the decline of Yiddish and the loss of these stories. When Jews were settling in Palestine before World War I there were discussions of what the language of this new country (still a dream, but עם טירצו and all that) should be. Hebrew won out over Yiddish and there are a few what ifs regarding what that society would be like if things had gone the other way. I fear that the psychology of powerful men taking power would still fight for society to forget women who fought back.

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Categories Feminism, Judaism, Literature, war

Ferguson

November 25, 2014 //
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A lot of people who have thought about and lived the Black experience in America will have better and more cogent responses to the current situation. What with another unarmed black boy killed this week, more needs to be done. The hat of a young woman on the train with me reads “Comme der Fuckdown” which would be a good start. Again, I’m checking my privilege poorly, but I don’t think riots are the way to go. I’m also aware that if the media is showing a riot, that does not mean There’s a Riot Goin’ On. More needs to start with law enforcement. I recall a quote posted after Mr Brown’s murder that read something like “Why are Black boys considered problems before they are considered people?” I don’t think there’s a blog post solution to endemic racism and police militarization.

Slyfam-riot1My first thought after reading of the murder of Tamir Rice in Cleveland this week, however, was that police forces need to act more like machine shops. I want news reports that start ‘{insert city here} has gone 21 days without the death of an unarmed suspect. Without the deaths of a men or women just going about their business. Without a presumption that being Black is being Guilty. Without police forces conflating their work with that of the justice system.

And how about a competition that rates police forces on how well they protect and serve their entire communities?

And how about funding municipal governments in such a way that (unlike Ferguson, MO) they don’t rely on fines imposed unfairly on one group?

It’s not much of a start, but I’d love to see the result.

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Categories United States

Justice and Politics – two subjects

November 2, 2014 //
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Police cautions to be scrapped in England and Walesn

The warnings in question are those sometimes offered to minor offenders rather than charging them with an offence.

The reasoning offered is that ‘victims shouldn’t ‘feel that criminals are walking away scot-free.’

I definitely appreciate that the recommended new system includes making apologies and restitution to victims. This is a step in the right direction. As is scrapping verbal warnings for violent offences including rape. That the current justice system hasn’t taken rape seriously enough to prosecute consistently in Britain makes my skin crawl.

Much to be said on that.

What worries me, however, is a trend towards giving victims a say in how punishment is administered. I think it undermines a push towards a system of properly blind justice. Because the systems in (to be fair) most of the world don’t actually work as they should, we might think that giving the victim a say in punishment will make it more fair, more just. The fact is, however, that someone who has been victimised is likely to want something harsher for the perpetrator than the crime might merit.

Less probable is the likelihood that victims might face retribution from the perpetrator’s circle if they are seen as having had a hand in a criminal’s sentencing.

To be honest, the article seems to be a bit of a hodgepodge. The new program is a pilot to see how better to prosecute low-level crime. This I can support, I think. The last line of the piece is possibly the kicker: 230,000 cautions were issued in England and Wales last year. How does that compare to the number of crimes reported? To the number of not guilty verdicts in crimes that went to trial? To the number of wrongful accusations?How about the speed of trials? Recidivism rates of first-time offenders over time. One of the only quotes in the article comes from the shadow justice secretary. This is an issue because it’s an extended attack on prosecution policy under the Cameron government. This doesn’t help the reader understand the new programme and the writer doesn’t do anything to challenge the bias of the speaker who is trying only to score points against the Cameron government.

Another story in the news this weekend is about a push to get photos of politicians wearing t-shirts that read ‘This is what a feminist looks like’. In theory, I think this idea is fine. Cameron would’t put one on and took flack for it. This, I think is less fine. Don’t give a non-feminist a hard time for not putting on a shirt that publicises a campaign in which he obviously and honestly doesn’t believe. Give him flack for not doing things in his rather huge power that don’t benefit women. The t-shirt campaign is throwing soft balls to politicians who aren’t doing the work of making people’s lives better. It’s easy for Clegg and Miliband to jump on the bandwagon, because women, theoretically are a more important part of their constituencies than they are of Cameron’s.

When we’re after some substantive discussion on the subject, who jumps in but News Corp. No love lost between me and the Murdoch empire, but it’s not as though they work to make the discourse clearer and policy differences more stark. No. What does the Daily Mail report, as reported on the BBC this morning?

The Mail reports that the shirts (which retail for 45 quid, profits donated to charity) are made by women paid 62p per hour in Maurtius sweat shops. The charity in question, The Fawcett Society claims they were promised the shirts were made ‘ethically in the UK’. Halfway down the BBC article a Fawcett rep is quoted as saying “At this stage, we require evidence to back up the claims being made by a journalist at the Mail on Sunday.” The Beeb might have started their article on the matter the same way. When reading anything published in a News Corp paper (or spouted on their TV stations – Fox News to start with), your first question should always be, ‘In what way is this person lying to me?’

(I wish I had jotted down a recent Wall Street Journal piece that Rachel Maddow quoted. She goes all out against Fox News several times a week, but just because the WSJ used to be respectable doesn’t mean it still is since its takeover by News Corp a few years ago.)

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Categories Feminism, Journalism, Politics, UK