Please follow the FCG blog for future posts, as that’s the new home for all things Erica. I’ll cross-post things here through early 2015, but after that and going forward, that’s where my blogging lives.
new post on fakecisgirl: “We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now: MRAs Are the Top Transmisogynists”
Check out my latest post on my new blog, fakecisgirl:
Please follow the FCG blog for future posts, as that’s the new home for all things Erica. I’ll cross-post things here until early 2015, but after that and going forward, that’s where my blogging lives. This is the first of a two-to-three part post, so there’s no time like the present to subscribe to the FCG blog if you haven’t yet!
new post on fakecisgirl: “An Open Letter To An Older White Trans Woman At Fred Meyer”
Check out my latest post on my new blog, fakecisgirl:
Please follow the FCG blog for future posts, as that’s the new home for all things Erica. I’ll cross-post things here until the end of 2014, but after that and going forward, that’s where my blogging lives.
new post on fakecisgirl: “Ain’t A Damn Thing Changed: TDoR Still Fails Trans Women of Color”
Check out my latest post on my new blog, fakecisgirl:
Please follow the FCG blog for future posts, as that’s the new home for all things Erica. I’ll cross-post things here until the end of 2014, but after that and going forward, that’s where my blogging lives.
new post on fakecisgirl: “#Gamergate? More like #GamersWhoHate, amirite?”
Check out my new post on my new blog, fakecisgirl:
http://fakecisgirl.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/gamergate-more-like-gamerswhohate-amirite/
Please follow the FCG blog for future posts, as that’s the new home for all things Erica. I’ll cross-post things here until the end of 2014, but after that and going forward, that’s where my blogging lives.
It’s Alive! …uh, sort of.
I left blogging because I had come to the conclusion that there was a new and better trans community forming online that wasn’t going to be about all the tired old BS. I also at the same time began selling off things that mattered to me and coming to terms with the fact that maybe I needed to try another tack, because blogging just was making me a drain, a burden, you name it. I’d at some point said a bit more than I should have about a couple of topics in my life because I was trying to get some Things off my Chest, and unfortunately it gave this blog a bit of a reputation. Such is life, and though I want to tell you I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation, I do because it ends up damaging the things I have to say. That said, I talked about what I needed to talk about, and have since set most of the blog to private…I’m reversing course about some of it and bringing some of my older writing back to publicly available. The all-lowercase schtick is atrocious, and I don’t really know what I was thinking, but some of it’s back! Some of it is staying just as private as it was when I bowed out of blogging.
Or, rather, I thought I bowed out of blogging. I’ve moved on to a new blog, fakecisgirl, where the first entry was about what I discovered that trans community to be: white middle-class trans separatism, just as poisonous as HBSers, but in new and allegedly “radical” clothes. Things I got shouted down for included who I fuck consensually, that I was being “too negative” in expecting white trans women not to say ‘ni**er’ (but without the asterisks, mon cheri(e)) in a public forum, being “married to” ‘LGBT activism’, and, oh yes, not being in the right line of work. Now, yeah, I might be a little nicer than average to the “LGBT activist” world for as much as they disappoint me, I’m a big bad butch and pretty much what shows up in textbooks next to the word “dyke”. The L in that struggle is my struggle, and has been for most of my life. It’s where I am visible and don’t really get a choice, so you’ll pardon me that I do think that counts, but that it’s not as important as centering the needs of trans women. The white seppie movement is just a new way to police the actions and lives of trans women, pushing the tentacles of patriarchal control into new spaces with new enforcers. It’s the same old shit, just in new ‘radical’ clothes.
So nothing’s really changed. The seppies, after their first few purges of the “impure” seem to have faded into nothingness, but at the same time there’s been no replacement of those online spaces that seemed more promising than the moribund messageboards ruled by the same bullying mindset. That bullying mindset is actually so much of what rules both our community from within, whether it be HBSers, seppies, “True Transsexuals”, or your garden-variety message board bully, but also rules many of our interactions externally. The widely promulgated concept that there’s just no talking it out with cis people just ain’t true, but at the same time the expectation that we repeat ourselves over and over again because cis people want us to is, well, kinda repugnant.
The same is true of our dealings with trans men: in mixed space, many of the people in charge are white trans men who engage in bullying tactics to gain and maintain power, while there’s little defense you have as a trans woman when such a guy decides to bully you out of a space. But you can’t get rid of all trans men in mixed trans space because a lot of them are do-right guys who also want the same ends of liberation. The problem is the one size fits all mindset, which does also enable both bullying and the culture that deigns some trans women disposable doesn’t work, and it cannot work if we expect to get free.
I know you’re sick of explaining yourself over and over. And you know what? There’s a point at which it’s time to say we’re done talking with those who refuse to play nice. But it doesn’t mean that the automatic assumption promulgated that some people are good and some are trash isn’t pretty messed up, or “deeply problematic” as you white folks like to say. We need to change the script, not keep re-casting the lead and hoping maybe it’ll take this time. We can’t afford Ellen Page, anyways…seriously that woman makes everything work. It’s amazing. Ever seen a really bad Ellen Page-centric movie? Thought so.
I’ve been happily blogging and tumblring away in my new home for a while now, and in fact I’ve stated we’re one and the same a couple of times, and at least one MRA hate-site has determined, in the words of their white supremacist leader, that “fcg is good old Eric Rottencroch”. Whelp, nice try, dude, but my name’s never been Eric and it’s cute that your first action of MRAsshole hate is to misgender me then make assumptions about the state of my genitalia. In fact, it’s telling that HBSers, MRAs, fundamentalist religious types that embrace patriarchal hate, and radical fauxminists (I don’t use the T-acronym anymore…) all seem to go for the same thing: misgender and talk about junk. That’s because, as you know if you’ve followed me in the past, it’s all the same hate, just with different enforcers. When it’s the same hate, and the same patriarchy, you know it’s the same old shit. And yes, I am more hated than ever by MRAs, which I think is a badge of honor of sorts. It’s worth noting that another reason I wound this blog down was that the frequency of MRA bandwagoning and threats was increasing rapidly toward the end…Eric Rottencroch doesn’t like those much, yanno.
So here’s the deal, as one of my dear friends is fond of saying: Come follow me at my new blog, http://fakecisgirl.wordpress.com and consider throwing a little e-coin in the tip jar since as you know being a single mixed disabled girl stuck in an empire in decline is costly, and think of how bad it’d piss hateful MRAs off! I’m going to be covering a couple of new things over the next month, since I decided to say F NaNoWriMo and do something else…these things include this year’s blog post on the continued failtacular state of TDoR (still “owned” by a white woman, still fucked up) and the reality of why whiteness-enforcing academically-based “social justice” movements have become bullshit. Oh yes and a piece on the disturbing spread of MRAsshole theology into trans women’s spaces, which is a direct right-wing threat from within, especially to trans women of color.
So hop over, ponder tossing a little coin (more coffee for Erica means more blog productivity…and Erica has a bad PSL habit…and is talking about herself in the third person…seriously, PSL omg PSL ALL THE THINGS), and I’ll see you on the fakecisgirl side. And yes, that is a reference to my own work, since I know some of you were wondering. I can totally be coy…or completely obtuse…sometimes both at once….
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.
