A friendly reminder about comments…

One:  This is an Erica-ocracy, not a democracy. In other words, this is my blog, and I get to decide what goes.

Two: Comment moderation is common amongst blogs. Birds do it, bees do it, and many, many other blogs do it. I am not unusual in having a policy of comment moderation.

Three: If you leave screaming incoherent rage, employ personal attacks, or accuse me of various fanciful things, I’m not going to unmoderate your comment. It’s going to sit in moderation where it belongs for eternity. 

Four: If you call me a “man”, an “it”, or any one of a number of the preferred terms of the transfundamentalist for referring to someone like me, there’s no way I’m going to unmoderate your comment. I’ve explained this many times: I don’t really care if some random cis person calls me a man, because they’d immediately be laughed off. In trans space, however, this is a weaponized term for anyone who doesn’t fit a very exact set of rules, and guess what: women don’t have to fit a special set of rules to be women. This applies to all women, and since trans women are women, it applies to us, too.

Five: If you’re just going to accuse me of “negativity”, please actually make some positive suggestions as to other ideas that you feel can be dealt with in a better manner. In other words, when you’re shut out all the damn time, you’re going to have some negative aspects to what you’re talking about. If you think speaking up makes me the problem, then you’re part of the problem. “Unity” in the trans community means all of us, not some of you and none of us. In other words, DON’T BE JENNIFER USHER. (Jennifer Usher = “Just Jennifer” and her bullshit misgendering and hatred toward almost all trans women.)

Six: Dissenting views are welcome, but you have to play by the rules. That means no misgendering, no racism, no fatphobia, etc. If you can’t play by these rules, you have no respect whatsoever for the forum. If you think this is “censorship”, please remember two things: I’m not the government or a governmentally-sanctioned monopoly, and yeah, you have freedom of speech, but when you say things they have consequences. If it’s more important for you to rail against fat people than it is to focus on trans liberation, I think you’ve just admitted your real priority.

Seven: If you want to speak with me directly, feel free to contact me at inchoaterica (at) gmail (dot) com. You can also say hey through the ask box on Tumblr, now that my Tumblr is back from the Tumblrdead, at http://ericainchoate.tumblr.com as long as you’re logged in. 

Eight: I forget what eight was for. 

the fallacy of scarcity

Just so you know, the theory of resource restriction on the basis of scarcity is that of my good friend Caylee, and I recommend you read their blog. Thus, they get the credit for planting the seeds of what this blog post is about, but the thoughts based on this observation are mine.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the logic of the transfundamentalist, and some recent events in my life have led me to attempt to pursue why some people who reject transfundamentalism in the trans community still perpetuate a creation of artificial scarcity in the trans community, especially when it comes to medical access and access to transcentric social space that is open to trans women. Artificial scarcity is what leads us to the threat of movies being put in the “Disney Vault” and rendered unavailable for the better part of a decade, a wonderful trick to boost DVD sales, or the frenzied flurry of activity that surrounds a sandwich known as the “McRib”, a formed pork patty which honestly tastes like pickles on wet cardboard to me.

Artificial scarcity may work fine with shredded processed pork or with the crime against animated deer known as Bambi II, but it just plum doesn’t belong in a situation where peoples’ lives are at stake.  Caylee, also someone who escaped fundamentalist Christianity, has remarked that much of this logic descends from Prosperity Gospel-type ideas, a particular strain of fundamentalist Christian thinking which proclaims that following faith will lead one to prosperity and health.  I grew up Mormon, which has a different take on the Prosperity Gospel theology but espouses most of the same things. It’s an ideal that unquestioning devotion will get you everything you want in life, often recreated in secular New Age twaddle like The Secret, which proclaims that thinking positive thoughts about money will make you have money by some unseen force. I’m thinking positive thoughts that the Mega Millions numbers tonight will be the ones on my ticket, but I know the odds of being mauled by a polar bear in Long Beach, California are slightly higher than the odds of my becoming a Mega Zillionaire. I know that no amount of thinking happy thoughts will bring me things; think happy thoughts because they’re authentic, think happy thoughts if you’re an optimist (and in places I don’t like to admit, I am one), or think happy thoughts because you’re happy. But don’t let the discourse become that any bad thing that happens to someone comes from “negativity” because people who are kept out may naturally feel negatively about those situations.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that treating people poorly won’t get you anywhere, and that having a truly negative attitude toward others based on your own fears really poisons things, often without your even realizing it. When you go up to a cashier at the supermarket screaming and yelling, I can guarantee you that transaction will go poorly. However, the enforcement of this scarcity may leave people in a position where negative thought comes into the situation. I’ll give you an example: grousing about not knowing other trans women in my city has led to three suggestions, namely that I should just suck it up and brave the awful support group because maybe it’ll be better this time, ask your friends to introduce you to other trans women (when you’re the only trans woman all your friends know…that’s not gonna work), or “create your own space”, which is kinda hard when nobody knows who you are and besides in the next breath the condescending “but there already is space…” always comes next.

Sure, there’s space. But the reason the support group is so hostile, the reason its capo is so vicious, is that the fallacy of scarcity is being enforced. If they let the “defective” people in, there’s no way that they can enforce this scarcity, and I, dear reader, am “defective” in the minds of these folks. Because in their gospel I am not worthy of being allowed, even if I’m willing to pay the $5 “mandatory donation”, and not willing to put up with what they may see as hazing but what really has an effect on a girl (sorry, calling me “it” is a real sore point), I am an outlier, a non-believer, a heretic.  Caylee is right: this is the prosperity gospel indeed.

But why do we accept this scarcity? Why do we choose not to be proactive about creating safe medical access for all trans women in the informed consent model for hormones and healthcare in a safe, shame-free environment when you go to the doctor for non-trans-related maladies? Why does our community refuse to share safe medical resource information with others where such resources exist?  Why do we give credibility to the idea that there’s one safe commons for trans women and that any unknown is inherently dangerous and bad? I could put an ad on Craigslist for a get-together over coffee one day a month for trans women, and I have serious doubts that it would ever get past people wanting to know who the hell I was. Yes, much of this is because there are any number of people with predatory interests, some cis and some trans, who believe that trans women represent a group of people who are easy to abuse and victimize. I’m pretty sure that this, too, is actually a product of the idea that scarcity means that we end up being vulnerable to these people. We have cults of personality who do destructive things within the community and go truly unchecked because of their “importance”, and they are able to gain frightening amounts of influence because they believe in their need to be the proverbial big fish in a small pond.

We need to stop accepting that this pond has to be small, and part of that is realizing that trans women come in all narratives, colors, shapes, looks, and sizes. You don’t have to be a transfundamentalist to enforce transfundamentalist rhetoric, and part of that is the desire to enforce this scarcity that permeates our community. The idea that this scarcity is necessary is actually something present in, for example, the rampant fatphobia in the “trans community”. When someone makes statements about fat people which imply we don’t deserve dignity or a wholesome diet, they’re actively pushing out fat people. When someone makes gross statements about people who are really skinny and shames their bodies, when half the skinny people I know would pretty much give anything under the sun to gain twenty pounds, they’re engaging in body-shaming and making generalizations about their bodies, too. And yes, the latter is a real problem, too. See also shaming people for choosing not to have facial surgery…and then shaming people who do who didn’t have it in a manner that satisfies someone else’s desire. These boundaries, this territorial spraying, is absolutely the behavior of people who believe that there is a very limited space which they must protect.

Now, I’m not saying you have to welcome in people who behave in disrespectful or problematic manners. Anne Lawrence, for example, should be excluded from our spaces because she’s a fucking rapist. (tw: rape, medical abuse)  There need to be some boundaries, but boundaries should be based on real actions and not fear. Personally, I’m pretty sure some of my problem is that I’m disabled and it’s really easy to throw around demonizing rhetoric about disabled people based on completely false rhetoric. For example, the idea that disabled people are violent, a stereotype that just isn’t true. In fact, a disabled person is fifty percent more likely to be a victim of violent crime than an able-bodied person. (It’s higher than 50% for women, by the way.)  Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. Yet the unexplained and severe phobia of disability permeates the “trans community”. Why is this? I feel that we are considered to be a safe group to target and exclude because we don’t fit the transfundamentalist vision of perfection and we often literally cannot. You’re still going to be able to tell I’m disabled from looking at me, and there’s no amount of surgery that can change that, nor do I have any desire to have it.  And guess what? In fundamentalist religion, we are held up as being both “inspiration” and subhuman wretches at the same time. In fiction, we are plot devices, from Helen Burns in Jane Eyre to Beth March in Little Women. We exist in public often treated by people like a living, breathing zoo exhibit. But if our actions aren’t problematic, why keep us out?

Well, it’s best explained by the difference between what happens when a child asks me what’s wrong with my face and an adult does the same thing. When a child does it, it’s out of curiosity, not understanding the situation and needing more information.  When an adult does it, it might well be out of curiosity, and when they take the honest answer and walk away or learn from it, great. But the sneering, angry “what’s wrong with your face” or “what happened to you” that comes from some mouths is never innocent, and it’s important to recognize that, because these people are playing into the idea of scarcity, too. My presence in their world confuses them because a “defective” is in their space, and I will tell you that I hear that tone far more often when doing things that indicate I have some responsibility in society, like minding children or doing public-facing work. Maybe someone who looks ‘normal’ should be doing that instead.

In other words, I know that the “trans community” is merely parroting patriarchal values and standards in enforcing scarcity, and that we’ve given people a free pass for unquestioningly upholding these patriarchal values as a way of devaluing people the patriarchy doesn’t like. It’s time to stop letting this be an excuse, though…being a footsoldier for the patriarchy after you’ve had it, repeatedly, pointed out to you what you’re doing means you’re accepting those patriarchal values or you’re too scared to question them, and either way you’re hurting people on behalf of the patriarchy. If we can transcend gender and birth assignment, why can’t we transcend the idea that some people are disposable? The people the “trans community” considers disposable are largely members of other minorities, generally racial minorities, but things like disability play into this also. We believe we have to enforce this scarcity with no proof that it has any benefit other than “things must be kept from those people.”

I’m one of those people. I refuse to believe that I must be denied a place at the table because of race, class, disability, and the mortal sin of being a size 22. When one enforces this artificial and completely unnecessary scarcity or act in complicity with it, it’s saying I am lesser, and that, dear readers, is what we call “fucked up” where I come from.

trans activism as it stands: where do we go from here?

I’ve had one hell of a case of writer’s block for about the past three weeks. I’ve got about five half-finished blog entries where I just lost interest and decided to go in another direction, and I think that’s because there’s something nacent going on in the world of trans activism: I think we’ve gotten about as far as we can on the Internet.

Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is a valuable tool for everything from playing MMORPGs to sending pictures of cats to each other. It’s a vastly powerful information delivery tool…and I’m sounding like a bad 1990s AOL commercial at this point. But the Internet can only go so far, and I’m beginning to think we’ve hit Peak Internet Activism within the trans community. Unfortunately, much as the world lacks a plan for Peak Oil, we haven’t got a plan for Peak Internet Activism. We have tremendous barriers to organizing, and in many cases we are precluded from basic participation within the larger trans community in many locales for a number of reasons, from transfundamentalists controlling space  to the fact that it’s still kind of dangerous to be a trans woman, especially a trans woman of color.  So we have barriers to entry into activism that are somewhat high, and these barriers end up keeping us out and because we don’t organize, things don’t change. Add in that we don’t have organized activist groups in many places or that you have to know someone in the group already (a friend of mine remarked that this is “fucking Friendster”) and this presents an additional barrier.

See, internet-based activism, much as the old guard has slagged and mocked it (while maintaining an Internet presence themselves) has been a way that dissenting, different, and otherwise excluded voices have had a way to speak up. My being disabled, fat, or not that pretty has no real bearing on my ability to engage in discourse and dialogue online, but it keeps me out of traditional trans spaces that are open to trans women. So it’s especially hard for me to have to consider that internet-based activism has run its course, as it gave me my first platform to speak to other trans women and identify myself as such.  Hell, I get mocked and put down as an “Internet Activist”…on the Internet. (The irony, it burns.) This past weekend, I did a panel where I sat in front of a room with a moderate number of strangers and identified myself as a trans woman. I’ve never done that before, and believe you me, I was completely terrified. I spent the entire bus ride over in silence kind of staring off into space and battling to stay in control, to stay in charge of my thoughts and emotions in hopes that I would be able to overcome the urge to jump off the bus at the next stop and run as fast as I could. And yet, it was pretty liberating once I said it. Because someone had invited me to speak, and because it was space for queers of color in general, I didn’t have to worry about the kind of thing that tends to happen to someone who is “other” within the trans community. I didn’t get interrupted, yelled at, or told that I’m an ugly man.

Trouble is, this was a once-a-year event, 180 miles away. It was a bubble, no more no less. And then I went back home, as I always do, and it was right back to my only outlet being, you guessed it, the Internet. Now, I did pwn some n00bz in Arathi Basin and there were certainly cat videos, but mostly I sat in front of a blinking cursor trying to get my thoughts down on something: growing up trans in the LDS Church (promise you that’s coming…eventually) and I ended up Googling on the pressing issue of Jack in the Box “tacos” for a solid 20 minutes. (The filling is beef and soy. You’re welcome.) The problem with the Internet is that we’re using it to discuss things, but we’re not using it to create spaces in the real world where we can actually accomplish things. We’re often railing against the lack of these spaces, though, because so many of us who are perpetually outside want to no longer be outside. I don’t want to be outside anymore.

Now, I know that there are some reasons people can’t participate in real-world spaces. For example, you might live in a town with 54 people in it in Wyoming. You might not be able to be out at work. You might have a disability that affects your ability to participate, though spaces should always take care to be accessible and yes…that’s more than just wheelchair access. You might not play well with others. And that’s fine and that should be taken into account. Just like Peak Oil doesn’t mean no more oil, Peak Internet Activism means we need to reserve the social space provided by this type of activism for people in these situations. We need to center voices who don’t have access to a commons, who don’t have access to activism.

But what I’m not sure about is how to make this possible. Sometimes I have a lot of questions and no answers, it’s just part of Being Erica, as my life has been defined by questions I can’t find answers to, and oftentimes when I do find answers, they’re either horrible or just lead to more questions. But this isn’t about me, even if I’m egotistically using myself as an example: we need real talk about how to create organized change for the trans community. We need to create an actual community and not just a “community.” We need to stop the casual and active racism that pervades our discourse and we need to accept that trans women come in all sizes, shapes, colors, and narratives. No narrative is less or more valid. No sexual orientation is more or less valid. And goddammit, failing to meet Caucasian heterocentric beauty standards doesn’t make you less of a woman, no matter what Jennifer Usher (aka “Just Jennifer”, which you Google at your own risk!) says.

We’re making great strides in terms of rights and visibility, and the rising tide is lifting some boats. Trans women of color are still openly considered disposable by much of the community, but that has more to do with how race and color affect media in general in North America. And recently the truly awesome Trans 100 project dropped a list of real people and what they’re doing in our communities…you’ll note how there are a lot of communities absent, because there’s still no access to community for many if not most trans women in a lot of places. But what we need is what we’re constantly demanding of the rest of the LBGT community: unity. I’m not silly enough to think we agree on everything, or facile enough to believe there won’t always be tyrants within our midst, but we ned to establish goals and work to demand them. We need to work to spread access to accurate identification, to outlaw discrimination both in fact and by policy, and to be outraged about every one of us killed every time it happens, not one day a year. We need to uplift those who fight for all trans women, like Janet Mock, Cecilia Chung, Mia Tu Mutch, or Trudy Jackson (too awesome to be contained by a website) and talk about these folks. And how about trans guys who have our back all the time like Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler or Shannon Minter while we’re at it?

We’re making progress, people. We’re creating change even with the constraints we have! Do you realize how far-fetched it would have been had you found me in high school and told me that someday I’d be telling strangers I was trans? I would have stuck my chewing gum in your hair.  You can say what you will about the Trans 100, but it’s an instrument of visibility, acceptance, hope, and love…and at least 80 out of 100 of those people are people leading the community forward.   But you know how we can really move forward? Quit policing who is and isn’t allowed in “the community.” If you can be respectful of others and you’re trans, you belong in the community. If you want to keep cutting others down at the legs, you can stick to your angry little island. I’m sure “Just” Jennifer Usher and her 54 sock puppets would love the company.

I just wish I could wave a magic wand and make this happen, and it breaks my heart that none of us can as things stand. So for now, I’m going to go get four of those awful not-exactly-taco things ($1.98 for a full stomach, the poor girl’s best friend), spend 30 minutes wandering around either Wikipedia or Azeroth aimlessly, and go to sleep. And maybe, just maybe, you can tell me where do we go from here…

don’t take a seat, don’t stand aside: when an artist who matters to you hates what you are

Like a whole bunch of dykes, I grew up listening to a lot of the Indigo Girls. The  soundtrack to my teenage years and more than a few awkward make-out sessions in the back of some girl’s Jeep Cherokee was formed in large part by their music. I learned every note on their eponymous album, and because of them and four nice white boys also from Athens, Georgia, I learned what the word eponymous meant well before I had to know it for the SAT. I learned a deep and abiding love for flannel, even.

I grew up on the music of people whose tunes felt like they were talking to all of us awkward gay girls. The Indigo Girls, Dar Williams, the Melissas (Etheridge and Ferrick), Tribe 8, Team Dresch, Laura Love, and Joan Armatrading all figured in there somewhere…there were others but they don’t spring to mind. Some of these artists have played the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, a CAFAB-only event open to people of all genders  as long as they were assigned “female” at birth. Some (Ms. Etheridge and Ms. Armatrading) haven’t played Michfest. Some of them have, and none of it really hurts worse than the Indigo Girls because if not for some of their songs, I’m not entirely sure I would have survived high school. I was a visible dyke from my first day there to the day I graduated, and mercifully I went to a high school where that wasn’t too weird. We used to joke that you can count the straight girls on the soccer team with two hands at the beginning of the season and one hand at the end.

But I lived in an abusive home in a small town, and leaving the protective bubble of school and its environs led me back into that rathole. My mother hated me for being gay, I lived just far enough afield from school that I had a long, nasty walk over a creepy bridge to and from school before I even got on the bus, and, oh yeah, I was still pretty filled with angst about being trans, which I had been taught to believe was an illness and a flaw. The days that I pretty much hid in my room with the door locked and barricaded, stuck on my headphones, and turned Rites of Passage  or Indigo Girls up really loud were many. This music was part of what gave me the tools to, well, save myself.

I once described the idea of an artist who means a lot to you who thinks you’re evil for existing as being “Amy Ray Syndrome”. I think I was talking about the passing of Adrienne Rich, who wrote beautiful and meaningful poetry…and hated trans women to the point she shilled for Janice Raymond’s exterminationist manifesto The Transsexual Empire. Ms. Ray wrote and sang some stuff that’s truly important to me, both in the Indigo Girls and on her solo work. I wrote her a pretty impassioned letter back when you wrote letters about playing Fest and why policies Fest advances really hurt trans women even off the Land, and I imagine her agent of the week threw it in the trash. I never heard back. Ms. Ray doesn’t comment on the matter, nor does Ms. Saliers, the other half of the band, but when you keep profiting off something that openly hurts people like me, that’s enough complicity for my blood. If you play Michfest, you know exactly what it stands for.

I can tell you about how much every last one of these songs meant because they kept me company for long, lonely walks across the creepy bridge, or in the break room at work after someone had called me a “dyke” when i shaved my head. I can tell you about how it felt to take the Peter Pan Bus up to Amherst to see the Girls live at Amherst College. We showed up so early  that we got in front of the line, we sat in front and I felt like I was right under Amy Ray like a peasant in the presence of fuckin’ royalty, down in the first row…when she hit the pedal at the beginning of the electric part of “Touch Me Fall” my hair kind of stood on end, my heart wibbled a little…it was about as beautiful as I could ask for. In those days, I didn’t even know about “the policy” of Michfest excluding trans women, nor did it ever cross my mind that these people who wrote music that moved my soul, my butt, and sometimes my tear ducts were on board with espousing such a thing. There’s other music that mattered, but nothing was quite the same, nothing was “Land of Canaan”…either version, the song that really summed up how I felt when my then-girlfriend cheated on me, nothing was “Kid Fears” and the vague sense of unease about my life and my insistence it wasn’t really abuse put into song. Pain from pearls, indeed.

I have made it no secret that I was educated well in second-wave feminist ideology, and if you strip out the racism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and white ethnocentrism that made for trouble, there’s a lot of good points in there about the systematic devaluation of women, our bodies, and our lives. Some of the reason my brand of transfeminism sounds different is that I don’t think the second wave needs to be tossed out with the bathwater so much as it  needs all the good things preserved and the bad things discarded. The loathing for sex workers? No thanks. The idea that trans women should be “eliminated”? Well, I’m obviously not down with that, either. But I don’t dismiss the second wave concept out of hand, as a lot of things like domestic work being work with actual value and the idea that the male gaze shouldn’t control the presentation of all women in the media are great concepts that later waves have ignored.

I’m not advocating one should be a housewife, of course…I want nothing less than to be a housewife, but if a woman so chooses, I’m alright with that, and her work does have significant value.  Similarly, I want no part of the male gaze and am outright repugnant to it, but if a woman chooses to opt in to seeking that, so much the better, but the male gaze should not be the minimum standard for women in any way. In neither sense is there one right answer other than kicking the patriarchy to the side of the road where it belongs, and that means patriarchy in all its forms. We need to be tools of our own liberation, not tools of the patriarchy.

One of the hardest conflicts I’ve dealt with since coming to terms with the fact that I can’t just pretend to be cis for the rest of my life is that I need to figure out my feelings about artists, and by this I mean any artist who plays Michfest and isn’t criticizing the living heck out of it and speaking truth to Lisa Vogel et al about Michfest’s CAFAB-only policy which includes scores of men and excludes scores of women at a music festival billed as being for women is that I’m not really sure I can live with myself if I’m giving these artists money. What I used to write off as a difference of opinion matters too much to me because so many policies that exclude trans women from spaces root their justification in the fact that Michfest retains this policy and still enforces it even if they’re trying to claim they don’t. CAFAB people are allowed to attend even if they’re men, but trans women aren’t allowed. It’s hard to see any event that openly welcomes some men but not some women as being about women at all. In fact, it’s about supporting the idea that some women are disposable.

I’m sad to realize I can’t ever in good conscience support artists who play Michfest uncritically, because they go from Melissa Ferrick (who at one point said she wasn’t going to play, and now does so) and whatever Kathleen Hanna’s latest project is to up and coming acts like THEESatisfaction where I really want to shut up and give you my queer PoC money, but why do I want to do that to an artist who supports policies that say I’m worthless and that say I indeed ain’t a woman? The idea that there is room for “disagreement”, a tired canard that gets repeated frequently on the Michfest bulletin boards, is really not doing anything good for any of us, because “disagreement” comes at the cost of supporting frameworks used to justify discrimination, to justify hating women like me.  “Disagreement” is just another way to say “shut up, trans women and everyone who supports including all women at Fest.” Just because the artist personally may or may not hate trans women, the silence remains bloody complicity in that hatred. I learned this from second wave feminism:  in feminist struggles you can’t ever be silent, you can’t ever stop screaming because otherwise you know what’s going to happen to you. I can’t live with myself supporting someone who supports as rabid and hateful of a trans-exterminationist as Lisa Vogel and the shockwaves her policies send down the line to “women’s spaces” across North America which openly encourage the presence of men and the exclusion of women and ground their policies in Michfest’s policy. And yeah, Amy Ray, this is what you stand for and this is why I’m hurt you choose complicity with a policy which says I am worthless.  Is this a bad time to say I wanted to grow up to be, like, half as cool as you? Is it a bad time to admit my bad high school riot grrl band was trying to figure out how to punk the shit out of “World Falls”?

As Dar Williams once sang, “(w)ell, sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging.”  And yes, though she’s now supporting trans-exterminationism uncritically, she has a point there: we don’t always get to understand the why of any of these things. Ms. Vogel refuses to discuss, refuses dialogue, and refuses to debate, choosing to say we’re excluded because we’re “men” at the same time that Michfest openly welcomes men.  It’s ridiculous packaging, and if it happened in a vacuum, that would be one thing…if Michfest didn’t advertise so aggressively in the dyke community that I am a part of and didn’t have an effect on things like providing homeless shelter space to trans women or the door policy at your local queer sauna, maybe this would be an isolated bunch of men and women in the woods in Michigan, but the reality remains that this isn’t all it is. When it comes to the idea of inclusive space for all women, I guess our dreams, well, “went up in dreams.”

Artists make political decisions all the time, and I understand that you have to eat, that you need to promote your record, and that Michfest is a pretty good paycheck all things considered. But nobody bothers to actually say that to us and go play Michfest and protest the shit out of the fact that their policy excludes some women, nobody is willing to just level with us and say it’s a business decision. The little part of my heart that got the crap kicked out of it when Dar Williams showed up on the lineup a few years back still hurts a little, but the repeated kickings from the old-school queer artists hurt a lot. It’s hard, bloody hard, to reconcile that an artist who makes something that matters so deeply to you, that made music that probably helped save your damn life, hates what you are through passive or active action. The open transmisogyny of artists like Bitch is one thing, but the silent complicity of the Amy Rays of the world is just heartbreaking. It hurts and it sucks because I know that Ms. Ray and Ms. Saliers probably don’t think about this stuff much but I also know they’ve accepted that complicity and what their answer is.

But, Ms. Ray and Ms. Saliers, you once told us that “(i)f I have a care in the world, I have a gift to bring.” And you know what? Such a gift would be speaking out against excluding any women (and welcoming any men) into a music festival which falsely billed as being for “women only.” I don’t expect some magical sea change overnight, but maybe, just maybe, someone’s willing to speak up. And then I’ll believe you don’t hate me when you’re playing Michfest. I know you have to make ends meet but can’t you make ends meet and stand up for all women at the same time? I know you have to make your money, but it’s time that you stop making blood money without criticizing it, and Michfest’s position makes every last penny you make on the Land nothing less than blood money.

Once upon a time…

trigger warning for sexual violence, physical violence, and self-harm. please consider this warning appropriate to all links in this entry. thank you!

Once upon a time, i was a miserable boy-thing from the wrong end of some assy state. I believed my life would never amount to a thing and that i would be dead in the next year.

Once upon a time, i slashed my wrists. Pretty good, actually. I went to the “mental facility” for youth that covered the whole state. It was shortly after a “medical professional” had committed some ugly and horrible violence against me. It wouldn’t be the first time i was raped, and sadly it wouldn’t be the last. He broke part of my face, which is why i’m asymmetrical.

Once upon a time, i told a therapist what was wrong with me and expected that she would humilate me, lock me away forever, or try to torture it out of me. I didn’t know where those fears came from, but i know damn well now.

Once upon a time, that therapist cocked her head sideways, looked at me, and told me there was nothing weird about that at all. And i was sure, SURE i was being tricked. And i was sure, SURE i was Making A Horrible Mistake, i was sure that i’d be locked away forever, where perverts and deviants were.

Once upon a time, she went to the psychiatrist who oversaw the place to attempt to intervene with my “family member”, my less-than-stellar mother, and explain what was wrong with Little pre-Erica. Her supervising shrink, a stern white man with an eternal frown, explained it to her that “You will have a corpse, or you accept having a daughter.”  It sounds almost ridiculous, it sounds almost preposterous. Once upon a time, i was ashamed of how this sounded. I bent the details to avoid it because it sounded so preposterous. Once upon a time, i believed i had to make my narrative sound right, which diminishes infinitely that once upon a time, that man was the first person to point at me and call me “she” and “her”.

Once upon a time, i started writing a journal. That quote above was the first words i wrote. Along with that “Dear Diary: My name is “Erica (lastname).” Shame how that didn’t work out, but maybe i am no Erica after all. Once upon a time i was…but you’ll see this is no story of once upon a time at all.

Once upon a time, i believed this to be a curse, i believed this to be something i deserved, i believed this to be a horrible flaw in my being. I believed this to be what would forever make me lesser. I believed this to make me a deviant and a pervert.

Once upon a time, i had to jump through ridiculous hoops to be able to get basic affirmation of who i was and what i was. Though the folks where i came from were understanding, the “gender therapist” who was the only option who’d see me in my area considered me something between an annoyance and a dress-up doll. He groped me more than once, pissed that i didn’t have “real breasts” and that i was doing my darndest when you’re forty inches around and flat as a board. He reminded me, constantly, of all the things i wasn’t. He used my dread pronoun “it.” He ridiculed my hair, he told me ugly girls need to know how to wear makeup, he mocked how i sat.  He had an almost prurient interest in if i liked the boys and if i had told them my HORRIBLE SECRET. See, once upon a time, you had to be heterosexual, or lying about it, to survive the Standards Of Care. It wasn’t that long ago, the US was on its first President Bush and i wasn’t exactly in some backwater town, either.

Once upon a time, i cleared his approval. I still hate all the hoops i jumped through and the fact that i played Little Princess Doll-Thing to get his approval. Once upon a time, i thought i’d never forgive myself for lying to him so i could be a Real Transsexual. I’m getting over that, slowly.

Once upon a time, i bought the rhetoric of being a Real Transsexual. I bought that self-loathing and hurting other trans women was acceptable. I am responsible for coming up, with some assistance, with one of the ephitets that gets hurled at trans women by other trans women now and then. I’m so, so, so, so, so sorry. Once upon a time, i believed that i had to do things like that. Once upon a time, i thought my invisibility in the cisarchy made me a better person than ‘those transsexuals’. Again, so, so, so, so, so sorry. Once upon a time, i believed that the age i transitioned at gave me some moral superiority…something i obviously now know to be bullshit, it’s just a goddamn number, it just tilts the number of years i got to be the right gender in my favor, and that’s a blessing, but it doesn’t make anyone better or worse, no matter what that number is. Once upon a time, i let myself be what transfundamentalists wanted, and like every story with a hapless girl who’s someone’s pawn, i didn’t end up with Princess Charming, i ended up being an evil stepsister. Once upon a time, i saw no shame in that. Now, i see it’s nothing but shame, internalized and externalized.

Once upon a time, i spent the next two decades of my life in a never-ending chain of self-loathing, being medicated into a stupor by people who “knew better” and promised “horrible consequences” if i stopped. I made small advances and believed them to be huge victories. I went with the flow. I was what other people wanted me to be. I was Erica-by-committee.

Once upon a time, i believed that Erica-by-committee was all i could be. I believed it was all i ever deserved to be. People felt sorry for Erica-by-committee. People pitied the pathetic little ball of horrors untold and unsaid, until i got angry and lashed out or freaked out. Once upon a time, those horrors lived right under my skin, plain as day to anyone who could see, but i would never talk of them. Better to be an asshole to someone than show your weakness, right? Or so i thought, once upon a time.

So to that deeply unwise boy-thing which slashed their wrists once upon a time on this, the 10th of February,  i wish i could go back and tell you that Erica-by-committee is not something to be, i wish i could figure out how to have screamed without using a scissors, i wish i could i wish i could. I wish i hadn’t been such an angry, afraid mess because of how other trans women treated me.  I wish i had stopped running from myself and stopped the dread psychmed cocktail sooner. I wish, i wish, i wish. We wish because it’s raging against something we can’t change, but we wish because it distracts us from what we actually *do* need to change. Once upon a time, i needed a committee, i needed other people to tell me who i was. Once upon a time, i wasn’t even a person, i was just a massive pile of self-defense that lashed out at good people and let toxic, awful people into my life, further alienating the good people. It’s a shame, but that too is once upon a time.  I mean, the upshot to all this is that i did kill that miserable little boy-thing. I got to be all the things i got to be since then, both good and bad, both beautiful and horrible.

But once upon a time is just once upon a time. It’s a term from fairy stories to teach little boys to be tough and to lull little girls into complacency. Our lives must be so much more than once upon a time. I must be so much more than once upon a time. Because once upon a time is how you live in the past, how you give dominion and control to others, how you never take responsibility for your own life.   Because when you live in ‘once upon a time’, your time is never now.

Besides, i want to make my own Happily Erica After on my own terms…er, i mean…Happily Ever After. I hope you’ll make your own, too…and maybe give Princess Charming my number?

we deserve better: on learning to love each other as trans women

i don’t always get along with my whole family. my brother is headstrong, my little sister is foolish. my siblings by choice, well…we’re siblings. i don’t always know how to fix my little sister-by-choice’s wounds as much as i want to help, and sometimes i flat out piss off my big sister-by-choice. i don’t always get on with my grandmother, who is still inwardly disappointed that i am not Erica the Proper Pioneer Girl ready to inherit their farm and a Wenger bonnet or two, but she covers it so well. but what unites us is love, because after all we’re family. at the end of the day, we love each other, even if sometimes we bloody well dislike each other.

similarly, as much as i am constantly tearing my hair out about how to deal with stressing the need for pan-African unity and solutions that work for all of us, at the end of the day, we are able to get to similar places on the page about what we need. Africans in the US are a really diverse bunch…some people came here 10 years ago, some folks (like me) had forebears who came here stuffed into ships. obviously, the US is a better place to be Black than some will have you think if you consider that i know people clamoring to come here from relatively peaceful places like Botswana and Mozambique…it’s not perfect, but i still kind of foolishly believe in the idea that this is a place the huddled masses can come, or even the not-so-huddled masses, as much as that’s been screwed up since 2001, especially for racial miniorities. we have learned, whether fresh off the DC-10 or if we’ve been here since slavery, how to get along to further our goals. is it perfect? no. do we disagree? absolutely. but when we deal with the Caucasian-kyriarchical structure we live on, we know how to speak with one voice for what we need. we know how to talk about what affects our neighborhoods, what we want to make our children’s lives better, and what we desire from a government which systemically tries to fail us.

in fact, this works in the disability rights movement, another movement that i’m part of. it works in the Latin@ and Native/First Nations rights/respect movements, which i see as an outsider that i support. it used to work in the gay rights movement up to a point, but the HRC and the monomaniacal obsession with making marriage available to same-gender couples ended up slowly destroying queer unity…and i say this as a supporter of universal marriage, by the by. the idea of advancing queer rights generally fell by the wayside and now we have a fractured and damaged queer rights movement where a small number of rich cis white gay men (and a few token lesbians) are all the HRC really cares about. now, in the vacuum of the HRC’s departure from leadership on queer rights, many state queer rights organizations, like Basic Rights Oregon and Equality Florida, have taken leadership positions in advocating for all queers, including trans people. is it a perfect alliance? lord, no. but when the cis queers have our back, our outcomes turn out much better.

i’ve spoken about my unpleasant and painful journey to self-acceptance far too much. i’ve talked about the fact that regrettably i used to be a transfundamentalist, and honestly i feel such great shame and horror in talking about it that it troubles me to go down this trail again. transfundamentalism destroys your ability to ever cooperate with other trans people, especially other trans women, and it wrecked at least a couple of friendships where i behaved like an asshole and where i wish i could have a second chance that i’m never going to get. it’s a destructive force because it’s inherently designed to get us to hurt each other because we’re supposed to. i feel like a horrible person that i went along with this shit, but i really believed this was going to be the price of my freedom. i wish there were any way i could apologize to the people who my bullshit hurt, but perhaps unsurprisingly they’re not willing to accept apologies. i am nevertheless very sorry, because my conscience will never be clean regardless of if those apologies are accepted or not. transfundamentalism is inherently destructive and practicing it makes you a hurtful person. like most things that make you an asshole, though, transfundamentalism is a choice.  just like people choose to be racist or choose to be homophobic, it’s a choice in every respect to be a patriarchy-enforcing transfundamentalist.

see, tranfundamentalism serves a false master: the idea that you are better than *those people* based on a few narrow criteria. what those criteria are seem to randomly change, whether it be physical beauty, genital surgery, facial surgery, social class, or one of literally scores of other things that can be used to proclaim some trans people “real” and some trans people “fake.” at first, when pronounced insufficient by other trans women because i’m not pretty, because i’m disabled, and because i’m not femme, i took this as an affront. but that’s the thing, folks: it’s not an affront to you, you’re just the person on the wrong end of the rifle here. everything transfundamentalism enforces is a false meritocracy based on adhering to certain things that don’t even necessarily have anything to do with cisnormativity but have everything to do with trying to enforce a preordained idea of how you’re supposed to behave. i have talked way too much about growing up Mormon, but the things i was expected to adhere to as a Mormon girl are remarkably similar to the rigamarole expected of trans women. dress in a specific manner. act in a specific way. do not cross authority or there will be consequences. sexuality is dirty at best and forbidden at worst. in fact, the hoops you’re expected to jump through are a veritable “Krabat’s deal” where you can’t really actually complete the contract without sacrificing people to unknown forces, “for the good of the rest of us.”

it’s time to stop. we don’t all have to get along. i’m still not gonna be besty friends with Autumn Sandeen or her “pal” Just Jennifer. i am fully and completely aware that in a world that glorifies the idea of “good and bad” in minorities that we all slip up…heck, as much as i am pretty much the stereotypical Angry Black Chick about many things, sometimes i inadvertently fail to have the back of other Black folk, often about really tiny things, but they add up. i know we can’t all get along, and i’m fine with that. but what i’m not fine with is the idea that toxic hatred of each other and the veneration of these false meritocracies are actually us destroying ourselves and each other all alike. when someone mocks the idea of informed consent access to healthcare for trans people out of their own fear that their legitimacy will be challenged, they’re doing two things: they’re actually eroding their own legitimacy by suggesting that a doctor deserves such thrall over us, but they’re also damaging other trans people out of some level of fear. the idea that some trans peoples’ deaths, generally those of trans women of color, are “acceptable losses” is part of what weakens us. the idea that there are some places trans women don’t belong, or we only belong with some conditions, hurts us all. it reinforces the idea that we aren’t good enough unless we meet arbitrary criteria, and it encourages the very conditional privilege that is a tightening garrote around all our necks when we believe we have to hurt other trans women to save ourselves.

we have pushed each other in front of the bus far more effectively than the HRC, Dan Savage, or Barney Frank. we have constantly begged for our humanity for too long, or accepted the Faustian bargain that some trans women are more equal than others. we are constantly bargaining with these kyriarchical structures which keep their boot on our throat, and that’s a fact of life. but what we need to do is achieve some amount of unity, regardless of how pretty you are or you aren’t, regardless of if you’re out at work/school or not, regardless of how big your hands are and regardless of what your eyefolds look like…we have to start to work together. we have to stop accepting the idea that we deserve to be consolation prizes because of who we are and begin to accept that backstabbing and hating really isn’t getting us anywhere and the fact that we’re expected to be complicit in hurting each other is hurting us all. you don’t have to be my friend, you don’t have to be anyone’s friend, but you do need to stand up, throw your shoulders back, and stop believing that living on your knees is getting you anywhere. because, trust me, i can tell you from experience that being that person who just backstabs and hates is an awful life once you accept that there’s something better than that. i’m tired of asking permission to exist, and i shall live on my knees no more. we need to learn to love and support each other, at least writ large, even the folks we can’t stand, if we’re going to grow stronger together.

transfundamentalism is hate; this is love. they’re both imperfect, they both have limits, and love won’t solve everything. i choose love, and i hope you will, too.

so i care about women to “score points”?

so some PTERF (patriarchal trans-exterminationist radical fauxminist) claimed that “homosexual males who want to be laydees only are feminists to score points”

whelp…if you’re gonna call me a man i guess i’m a heterosexual man…sorry, PTERFs, calling me a “man” is just funny. it holds no pain, no damage for me personally. it’s like hitting me with a chicken feather.  i know it’s supposed to wound trans women and that it’s a part of PTERF rhetoric to try to hurt us…but you can do it to me until there’s no tomorrow. i can dress in drag and call myself Mark and everyone will still call me “she” and “Marcia”…”man” ain’t gonna hurt me. so come at me with it and leave my sisters alone.

but let me set you straight about why i care about the status of women:

i care about the status of women for my blood sisters

i care about the status of women for my chosen sisters

i care about the status of women for my grandmother, my aunts, my female-identified cousins, and so on and so forth

i care about the status of women for my friends who are female-identified

i care about the status of women for my enemies who are female-identified where we hate each other because of toxic girl hate

i care about the status of women for my woman/girl-identified students

i care about the status of women for every woman on this 22 bus

i care about the status of women for my lovers, past and future

i care about the status of women for my community

i care about the status of women for little girls who still have their hopes and dreams intact without the scourge of gender programming telling them they’re lesser in their life yet.

i care about the status of women for each and every one of us in this goddamn world

i care about the status of women because the world inherently devalues relationships between women, from our friendships to our marriages and everything in between

i care about the status of women because the world inherently devalues us

and, yes, i care about the status of women for me, because i am one and i am fortunate enough that society and i agree that i am one…but i don’t give a shit about scoring points

i care about the status of women because the world still holds us to impossible standards, uses us for cheap labor, calls our bodies diseased, and calls us distaff…and we all deserve nothing less than equality, safety, and to be valued for the treasures we all are.