Kyriarchy

Reproductive Justice and the Invisible Sisterhood

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

I delivered this speech at the opening plenary of the 2013 State University of New York– New Paltz Women’s Studies Conference. I present it here in its original written form without additional comment.

(Well, one additional comment: If you wish to follow along with audio and hear the voice of Nuclear Unicorn, click here. My profound thanks to Eli Mann for the recording.)

***

sisterhoodispowerfulPatriarchy does not begin in our bodies.

Contrary to those theories, feminist and otherwise, that seek an “origin myth” for patriarchy that germinates somewhere in the uterus, patriarchy has no starting point in reproductive organs of any kind—there is nothing in our marrow as women, our DNA, that sets us up as ontological victims of men whose bodies, whose bits, predispose them to oppression.

In the words of legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon: “It is one thing to identify woman’s biology as part of the terrain on which a struggle for dominance is acted out; it is another to identify woman’s biology as the source of that subordination. The first approach certainly identifies an intimate alienation; the second predicates woman’s status on the facticity of her biology.”

Put bluntly, there is no truly feminist or social-scientific way to reason that patriarchy begins in a womb, an ovary, or the vagina. What is much fairer to say is that the meaning society gives our bodies is what oppresses us—and also what binds us together, however unwillingly. I begin here because if I am to speak about trans women’s experience of reproductive injustice, I cannot indulge the false premise that women are born to be oppressed—a very different notion from saying we are born into a world that oppresses us. Much searing truth remains in Simone de Beauvoir’s timeless assertion that “one is not born but rather becomes woman.”

Those words invite us to search for the full depth of their meaning.

I.

Patriarchy does not begin in our bodies, but it is often very intimately concerned with them. I would suggest, above all else, that patriarchy does powerfully regulate and control women’s bodies—not because a sizeable percentage of women have ovaries (not all of us do), nor because many women menstruate (not all of us do), nor because every woman can get pregnant (many of us can’t)—but because there is a powerful, controlling ideology about what bodies are for that transcends the particulars of any one woman’s embodiment.

Transfeminist writer Autumn Nicole Bradley asks us if an infertile cisgender woman would, in a feminist space, “be thanked for sharing her struggle, welcome in the knowledge that everyone there understands that when women are reduced to their presumed reproductive ability, reduced to their parts, the misogyny catches all women in the blast regardless of their ability to reproduce?” I would ask you to think of trans women in the same light.

Feminism has often been accused—sometimes wrongly, sometimes rightly—of essentialising and universalising “woman.” Yet more often than not it is feminism that has been the necessary antidote to the patriarchal myth that all women are the same bundle of incapabilities imbuing an alabaster, pedestalised angel who exists only for man’s pleasure—for every woman who does not fit, we are cast into the fires of violent oppression at its most naked; women of colour, transgender women, poor women, women with disabilities, loud and outspoken women, sex working women, any woman regardless of race and class who refuses the objectification of that invisible cage. As we are tortured in the shadows, the myth of patriarchal essentialism—centered on a mythic, silent and obedient white virgin upon her pedestal—beats on.

Male dominance gives our bodies a very particular meaning, one that purportedly unites us and submerges all particularity, all individuality, beneath its event horizon. Our bodies are meant for one thing, and one thing alone. Ours is to reproduce; and if we cannot, then we are condemned to the great, ever swelling ash heap of this society—those considered unable to fulfill their supposedly naturally ordained functions. And yet, we know patriarchy does not apply this meaning equally; for all its mythologizing about the eternal feminine and the ultimate indistinguishable unity of women, it recognises we are not all the same. Our patriarchy, struck through as it is by classism, racism, and other forms of prejudice, desperately wants to prevent some women from reproducing—killed or sterilised by the hundreds of thousands, targeted daily by microagressions writ painfully small and propaganda writ blazingly large.

Yet even in this case, we see where patriarchy begins and ends: its alpha and omega is the meaning of women’s bodies, and so much hinges on how suited we are judged to be for reproductive purposes. So much hatred is directed at us around the issue of reproduction—whether it is forcing white women to have children or forcing black women, native women and Latinas not to. Patriarchy really cares about what we’re doing with our bodies.

Consider, no less, how the interventions of women of colour have broadened feminist understandings of reproductive justice: reminding us that reproductive injustice happens when we are forced not to bear children or adopt, as when we are forced to do so. In every case, what links them is both a denial of women’s agency—our right to choose—and a meaning imposed on our bodies by a sexist society that seeks to stifle and suffocate our humanity beneath that overriding myth of idealised motherhood. Motherhood on the terms of cisgender men, particularly white men; comprised of the right kind of mothers, doing the right and proper things—mostly involving keeping our mouths shut and bearing our pain with silence and obedience.

Where does one suppose trans women fit into this?

II.

Feminist activist and city councillor Sarah Brown once posted a conversation between herself and a cisgender man who was sexually harassing her, fetishising her for being a trans woman. He cackhandedly asked her whether she was trans or cis by saying, “so r u a natural woman?”

Her reply: “What, like the song? Or do you mean, do I occur in the universe? Because, I like to think so.”

That natural occurrence is, perhaps, one of the more troubling aspects of our existence, so far as patriarchy is concerned. For a society that believes so very passionately that women are made to reproduce—and to do so in a certain way—the fact that we keep damnably and insistently popping up is a source of unending consternation to those most invested in biologist myths. Put plainly, I am not supposed to exist. I shouldn’t be here, and my occurrence in the universe not only disrupts what is meant by “natural” but also what is meant by “woman.” I share that quality, as I alluded to earlier, with many women whose bodies are not capable of reproducing in the way women are presumed to be universally able to.

You may wonder why I spent the last couple of minutes on so much foreground, by the way, barely mentioning transgender people at first. The reason for this, for summoning up theoretical arguments against essentialism that underlay the best of the feminist tradition, is explained by the following comment from a cisgender woman replying to an article I wrote on Feministing about why “trans rights are reproductive rights,”

“Reproductive rights are at their core the right not to die or be crippled or to be left destitute or be trapped in a violent relationship by an unwanted/unplanned… pregnancy.

Trans women cannot get pregnant, this is not about trans women.”

For all the cisgender women out there who can’t get pregnant, I’m sorry, but I guess this isn’t about you either.

Statements like this, which appear well meaning, mistake the terrain of reproductive injustice for its fundamental cause. There is no doubt that women who get pregnant are ruthlessly targeted by our society for dehumanisation and shackled by a regime of bodily control, one way or the other. But for those of us who cannot, we are in many cases ruthlessly attacked in part because we are unable or unwilling to fulfill the patriarchal mandate that says women must bear children in order for them to be both legitimate and successful women. We all feel that pressure, whatever our bodily configurations may be. That’s because it doesn’t arise from our bodies or begin in the shape of our genitalia, but instead is projected onto us by the society in which we live.

When I came out, one of the first things my father lamented was the loss of his grandchildren, the loss of progeny who would—by blood—carry his name and his “legacy.” Then came the recriminations about what my body was “for” and what “God put us on this earth to do.” I was no good to my family as a woman if I could not bear children. Interwoven in all of this is that very ideology about what bodies are for. It is precisely the same ideology that has seen women coerced into having children, that has seen people of colour brutalised under eugenics programs that sterilised them, and that has created a byzantine web of regulations regarding what trans people can and cannot do with their bodies.

It is the ideology behind laws in many countries that require trans people to be sterilised before our gender markers can be changed on various IDs and the ideology that still sees too many psychiatrists enforcing gender norms on their trans patients as a pre-requisite of trans healthcare. We all have different medical needs as trans people, but for those of us who require hormones and surgery we are often spiritually blackmailed for them (“wear this skirt and makeup or I won’t see you as a serious woman”). We may be charged dearly for the pleasure and then laughed at if we suggest such things should be covered by either public or private insurance. We may also be denied transition altogether.

All in the name of what some people—particularly men—think our bodies are for. What they think a woman’s body should be.

One of the central reasons that what we do is considered “self-mutilation” is that we are seen to be destroying our purportedly natural reproductive capacity. We are seen to be revolting against a genetic inheritance that should obviate the very existence of transgender people; sinful enough. Yet, far worse in the eyes of many petty patriarchs is when trans people express their biological reproductive capacity. All the consternation over Thomas Beatie, the trans man who made headlines with his pregnancies, illustrates this. The laws in Australia, in the UK, and in several American states that prohibit trans people from changing the gender markers on identity documents until we can prove we’ve surgically altered our genitals illustrates this.

Our limited access to reproductive care facilities illustrates this. All such facilities expect an unproblematically cisgender man or woman. So when a Planned Parenthood clinic is confronted with a transgender man who needs a gynecologist, or when a sperm bank is confronted with a trans woman who wants to have children of her own someday, it occasions the medical equivalent of a constitutional crisis that sees these trans people shown the door more often than not, left to fend for ourselves.

When trying to bank her sperm, one trans woman I know was asked by the attendant on the phone why she was doing this. When my friend explained, the staffperson abruptly said “That’s not real” and hung up on her.

Hm.

A close friend simply got the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” treatment when she revealed she was trans.

We are damned because through transition we may sterilise ourselves, but we are equally damned if we try to preserve and express biologic reproductive capacity. We are caught in the very double bind Marilyn Frye deems essential to oppression. We transition, therefore we upend naturalist myths—and that existence is bad enough—but to make sure we don’t pass on our cooties and do even more violence to that patriarchal mythology, the state demands that we become sterile anyway if it is to suffer our insistent existence.

Little to no medical research is done on trans people and reproduction—whether to simply collect data or to create organs that might allow me to bear the child I should love to have someday—we are not supposed to exist, after all.

III.

Yet do you know what else is really threatening about that existence? About everything I’ve just described? It is the fact that we as trans people—whether we are trans women, trans men, or genderqueer—expose the fatal flaw of naturalism, just as many before us have in ways great and small. But in our way, we put the lie to the idea that to be a woman, or a man, means fulfilling some evolutionary imperative, or to silently obey the edicts of our selfish genes while using the bits we were born with.

We upend the idea that one is born anything, and tacitly remind all that we “become” something.

Let me speak of this from the perspective of trans women.

When I go out into the world and have a gender ascribed to me—one that is almost always some kind of woman—the people who gender me are not thinking about my genitals, or my chromosomes, or what is on my birth certificate. I present as a woman, according to the various cues that our society assigns to the gender of ‘woman,’ therefore I am one so far as they are concerned. Therefore I am treated as one.

I run the same risk as cis women do of going into a job interview and being silently judged because I’m a young woman who “might get pregnant and leave the company”—I might get mommy-tracked, if I’m hired, and if I come out, I run the risk of being fired because I’m trans. No uterus required, just patriarchy.

In the street I face men who sexually harass me because they see me as a woman, and therefore they feel entitled to my body, whatever its configuration. No uterus required, just patriarchy.

I find myself condescended to and mansplained to; I’ve been the target of rape threats, I have been stalked and harassed online, and I’ve been called every sexist and transmisogynist slur in the book—including ones I hadn’t heard of. I was told that I was a “feminazi whore with too much sand in her fake vagina.” I’d never spoken to this man about my body—and but for the word ‘fake’ he merely said what he might’ve said to any cis woman. No uterus required, just patriarchy.

As we speak, trans women of colour in New York City are literally having their handbags raided by police officers who then arrest them on prostitution charges if they’re found to be carrying condoms. Where are their reproductive rights, one wonders? No uterus required, just patriarchy.

Women are not wombs; that is one of the most powerful lessons that feminism has tried to teach a stricken world. I say to you, my sisters in this audience, that I stand with you; I have walked where many of you have walked, and we must not be divided from one another by our corporeality, but united by our shared womanhood.

Women are not oppressed because we have wombs; wombs are attacked because they are perceived to belong to women. For those of us without wombs, because we are still seen as women our bodies are disciplined and controlled in other ways. For trans men and genderqueer people with wombs, who refuse a womanhood patriarchy relentlessly tries to foist upon them, they too find themselves viciously attacked in part because they refuse to adhere to naturalism—they may dare to show that pregnancy does not only define the condition of woman. This is very bad news for patriarchy.

We are learning, as a society, that the Sun does not orbit the Earth. Our entire view of the universe is being changed.

IV. 

As I opened with a few words from Catharine MacKinnon, so too do I close. She once wrote of oratory, “A platform and a period of time and listeners who choose to be there create a threshold of mortality. If you never say anything else to them (you might not) and if you die right afterward (you could), what would have been worth this time?”

What indeed. What I would say to you if I could say naught else, my listeners for this space of time, is this: I am your sister.

We as trans women are not an entryist plot trying to distract from “the real issues,” we are women who are simply trying to get by, trying to move around, trying to live, and to claim the humanity that is the common birthright of us all. We bring not dissension and dissolution, but the same truths that women down the centuries from Sojourner Truth to the Lavender Menace have brought. The truth of feminism’s promise: that none of us will win unless all of us do, and that we are all ultimately united in struggle.

We as trans women have always been here—for while theoretical debates about our womanhood prevail, the fact of our womanhood prevails in the world out there. Patriarchy makes no mistakes about us; we are targeted because we are women. We are a great sisterhood invisible.

That notion of sisterhood, battered over the years by so much criticism, still thrums through so many trans women who find comfort and refuge among other women like them—and sometimes, as has been blessedly true with me, cisgender women who see in me their lives and struggles recited back to them in a different voice, but one that resonates with theirs.

As women, our diversity has always been our strength. It is not just an invisible sisterhood that links trans women together, but it also links cisgender and transgender women as one indivisible whole that no amount of transphobia, whether postmodern or second wave in provenance, can ever tear asunder. We share something far more essential than a body: we share the fact that we are survivors. We share the fact that patriarchy imposes a meaning on our bodies that demands something soul-wrenching from us.

But we also share this. This spirit, this will, this passion, something that burns beautifully and demands that our swords not sleep in our hands until we have built a world where all women, where all people, shall be free of those imposing ideologies and free of the nightmares that dog too many of us. We share the belief in a better world, we share hope for our children—for those we have and those we were not allowed to have—and we share lives that are insistently and powerfully lived; beautiful lives.

We are you, and you are us.

What links us is not our scars or the ways we have been hurt, but our aspirations to rise above oppression’s fetters, and claim our bodies for ourselves.

Our bodies, our choices.

All Things to All People: Some Brief Notes on Solidarity and Free Speech

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment
Pictured: the idea so often lacking from non-debates about free speech.
The idea so often lacking from non-debates about free speech.

If transgender people have a “superpower” it is our remarkable ability to stand for anything:  living, breathing “floating signifiers.” Our meaning d’jour is, for some on Fleet Street, “a professionally offended, Left wing lobby group” that is now the latest “post-Leveson” threat to free speech and a free press. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of things—fleeting as these meanings are, such that we can even speak of stable oppositions—Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill had accused trans people of dividing and distracting the Left from its “important” goals and its “true” cause.

If this seems exasperating and contradictory, you ain’t seen nothing yet, as they say.

But for now, it is enough to deal with these two absurdities one at a time and bring a bit of light to a decidedly un-illuminating heat.

Free Speech: From Posturing to Substance

Toby Young and all the other vacuous, fly-by-night defenders of “free speech” filch lovely rhetoric that whistle stops past all manner of liberal democratic tropes while failing to specify the connection between, say, hate speech and liberty. They use language meant to bypass both the intellect and one’s reason, while subtly refusing any attempt at being substantive. To do so would be to pull back the curtain at Oz and reveal the great democratic wizard to be nothing more than a petty would-be tyrant in disguise. In his entire blog post, Young does not mention the content of Burchill’s article once, instead gesturing to the void indirectly by casting trans people as some monolithic left lobby opposed to free speech.

He has archived Burchill’s piece for the world to see, so readers can judge for themselves, but it is a curious choice—to say the very least—to use an article that was almost entirely vapid schoolyard bullying and name-calling as some kind of heroic exemplar of courageous speech. He takes this to a laughable pinnacle by comparing Burchill’s screed to The Observer’s opposition to Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal, now widely regarded by historians as the last gasp of the British Empire. Clearly these were equal acts of great courage.

Yet, if one refuses Young’s attempts to cut their intellectual brake lines, it’s plain to see that Burchill’s article was no Watergate, no “Pentagon Papers.” To compare Burchill’s privileged tantrum to great acts of journalism is offensive to the profession (and if one wants to read incisive feminist journalism, I cannot recommend Ms. Magazine more strongly—their investigations into the plague of rape in the US Military, and the anti-abortion lobby’s links to terrorism are, alone, reminders of what truly courageous pens might write).

Instead of asking substantive questions about Burchill’s writing, Young thoughtlessly defends it without any regard for its content, nor any attempt to engage with it meaningfully. This is profoundly anti-democratic. We do not, in a truly free society, throw our hands up in childlike awe and say “Oooh, there are so many ideas out there, that’s nice!”—ideally, we engage with them, we debate, and we argue; we consider them on their merits, weigh them, and are fully allowed to find them woefully wanting.

Pictured: Something exactly like Julie Burchill's Observer article.
According to Toby Young, the Observer’s willingness to oppose this historical event is the moral equivalent to publishing Julie Burchill’s piece. As you can see, they’re exactly the same thing.

That is precisely what trans women, our loved ones, and allies did with Julie Burchill’s codswollop. And it is here that we come to what else is so utterly pernicious about Young’s unthinking editorialising: he has completely misrepresented and lied about the motivations of Burchill’s critics. Many of us, myself included, did not want the Observer article taken down. What we wanted was to be heard, and to counter the spreading of hate. Some of us wanted Burchill to apologise, and some wanted the piece taken down, yes, but I’d not say the latter was a widespread, agreed-upon, much promoted goal. It is certainly fair to say that few of us are mourning the piece’s loss. It is no Vindication of the Rights of Woman (quite the opposite, in fact), nor is it Candide. It was gutter trash of the lowest order, and even if you don’t give a toss about transphobia, one would have to concede it was tenth-rate writing. Its deletion from the Observer’s website is no loss to anyone.

And yet, while Mr. Young may think himself a dutiful democrat for preserving and republishing the piece, he might be surprised that he was beaten to the punch by many of the same trans activists he was attacking. Most of us had a problem with the article being used as “link bait” for the Observer, driving up their ad costs with every click. This shock and awe tactic is, tragically, a commonplace in online news websites. Many of us, who wanted to preserve the public record of Burchill’s hate, have reposted the piece elsewhere—both to ensure that it was not flushed down the memory hole, and to ensure that people could read and judge for themselves, while denying The Observer profit-from-hate. If Mr. Young had bothered to talk to any of those faceless and nameless activists he decries, he might have seen that our motivation was not to punish “political incorrectness” but to add to the discourse, with the urgency that hate speech always demands.

That is democracy.

Speech Acts

It is also worth remembering that if one wishes to defend free speech, one must know what they are defending and why. More of those nattering specifics that tend to deflate gassy rhetoric, yes.

Speech does something. That is why it’s so powerful, cherished, and defended as a fundamental right. But like any right, it can be abused, used to the detriment of others, and cause great harm. Citizenship, by contrast, is the craft of using rights and liberties to further the cause of freedom. Burchill’s piece, on the other hand, was both puerile and dangerous in the most vulgar way. Words like hers are hurled along with glass bottles at trans women fleeing for their lives from angry, hateful cisgender men. Ideas like hers fuel housing discrimination, see trans people excommunicated from their families, usher us with sibilant urgings to suicide, and are deployed by people who need to justify violence against trans people.

Burchill’s words and ideas, to the extent they have any substance at all, are simply the anima of hatred; hatred that revokes trans women’s rights. It sees our free speech muzzled, lest we be attacked for naming our experience and concerns. It sees our right to life snuffed out and declared conditional—less important than a privileged journalist’s right to lose her intellectual lunch in a national newspaper. It sees our right to free movement drastically curtailed, our right to healthcare passively but firmly denied.

None of this has a whit to do with “being offended.” It has everything to do with survival.

Our speaking up—as feminists, LGBTQ activists, and concerned citizens—was an attempt to ensure that Burchill’s article, which ended with an unambiguous threat and was essentially one long piece telling us to “shut up” (where was Mr. Young then?), did not have its intended silencing effect. If Mr. Young seeks enemies of free speech, instead of rudely stereotyping trans women he might well simply look in the mirror.

Solidarity and the “Real Issues”

Only a briefer note is necessary to deal with the odious counterpart to Young’s Left-baiting, and that is Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill’s snide suggestion that we are a single issue group devoted to a myopic cause at the expense of wider solidarity. Never mind that this exact argument has been used against feminists since the 19th Century and is a common silencing tactic.

I am proud to work for an organisation that is devoted to precisely the kind of solidarity that Burchill so disingenuously “defended.” The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is concerned with those wider economic issues that structurally oppress so many in our society—the austerity and cuts crusades now being trumpeted from Whitehall to Washington. We’ve been on the front lines trying to fight the manifestations of that malignancy as they particularly affect low income trans people of colour, and do so in solidarity with organisations and nonprofits serving different communities. Our goal is to not only provide our clients with basic legal needs and representation, but also to help them join activist communities of their fellows, educating them about often opaque and esoteric rights they may have (in the social services system, for instance), and enjoining them to take part in discourse, education, protests, and the fight for justice.

This is not done through an artificial focus on trans issues, as if they can they be neatly and discretely parcelled away from all others, but through recognising that whatever “trans issues” are, they are made up of class politics, immigration politics, racial inequality, social-structural sexism, a culture of policing and incarceration, and so on. These are inseparable from each other, and necessarily inform our response to the issues of our time.

It was one of many reasons that I found Moore and Burchill’s claims to be both divisive and fatuous. So many trans people learn the true meaning of solidarity the hard way, and many of us who are feminists and rights activists are part of organisations that—far from being ‘single issue distractions’—are deeply embedded in broader struggles against austerity, sexism, racism, and the ever widening wealth gap in the West; others fight with a tighter focus on neo-colonialism and foreign policy. But we are all immensely concerned with the battle for wider, meaningful liberty, and it is nothing more than a hateful lie to suggest that we are not, simply because we have the audacity to defend ourselves when attacked so viciously by name.

Once as Tragedy, Again as Farce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading →

Ignorance and Want

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

Trigger Warning for explicit discussion of rape and its attendant traumas.

Rape culture is an institution, to be certain; one whose powerful manifestations and expressions are found in all too many quarters of our society and whose influence is wide as it is deep. But like any social phenomenon one is well advised to take a magnifying glass to the small drops of mortar that bind together the brick wall of this institution. In reading a thread on a popular website about rape, a woman, who has since deleted her account due to the shaming she endured, stepped forward to make passionate arguments against rape apologism. Eventually she would describe her own experience. I do not have her permission to republish her story, so I will only quote a powerful line from her post that speaks to a general experience:

Have you ever been raped? Do you know what it feels like to be turned into someone else’s object? The worst is how filthy you’ll feel after. You just want to be clean. You want to die, you want to be alone and scream in utter agony. You want to be skinned alive because that’s the only way to get the filth off of your skin and out of you. Despite all this, you’re brave enough to make your way to the police station. You’re alone, you don’t want your friends to see you like this. You’ve got cold cum congealing on your inner thigh and bruises on your neck and wrists. You feel disgusting. You are at the lowest point you’ve ever been.

This began a powerful piece that told the story of her experience levelling an accusation against her rapist, a young man who- in a rather shocking and thoroughly unexpected turn of events- was so popular that the police officer she spoke to warned her off pressing charges lest she “ruin his life.” Popular, well-liked and talented men, after all, do not rape. Their victims, meanwhile, are silenced and shamed into invisibility and forced into finding a way to negotiate with their pain on their own terms as best they can.

Their lives are forever changed while their rapist walks free, unaccounted for, and nowhere near as scarred as his victim. We rightly heap scorn on the people who rape: I myself spared no kind language for the rapist of my friend in last night’s article, calling him a bastard. No words in our tongue are too unkind for him and his ilk. But rape culture is not just about the people who rape. It’s about the vast networks of social support that underlie those incidents of rape, that condemn rape when ‘the perfect rapist’ rapes ‘the perfect victim’ but otherwise excuse, deny, encourage and otherwise call into existence the circumstances that make rape inevitable. To illustrate one manifestation of this that will be the subject of today’s piece, let me quote to you one man’s response to this woman’s moving story on that same site:

One bigoted small-town police officer can’t be representative of the entire society. and there are hotlines and such, etc.

I really hope nobody thinks, “wow, Internet people really don’t take rape seriously. I shouldn’t even try to report it.”

That’s it. That’s all he could muster in response to a lengthy and detailed story of pain. As I read this, blinking, I wondered at whether or not he was moved but could not bring himself to say so. I wondered if he was like Ebeneezer Scrooge, beholding the metaphorical urchins of Ignorance and Want and haunted by his past tirades of “are there no prisons!? Are there no workhouses!?”

“Are there no hotlines and such?” is about the only way I could read that dismissive post, a small effort to banish from this man’s sight the horrible thing that had just manifested itself before him- the ugliness and sheer horror of rape, spoken with certainty by an eloquent survivor. Shocked as surely as Scrooge was shocked when the Ghost of Christmas Present revealed those urchins, shocked by being confronted with the underside of a society that he prefers to ignore and yet has to exist in order for him to enjoy the comforts and privileges he does. This woman dared to show him and all he could do was ask “Are there no hotlines?”

He asks this because he will not face up to the terrible truth that this bigoted small town police officer is a very common character in the narratives of rape survivors. Their dismissals, their bigotry, their scorn and heartlessness are enabled by people thinking that surely most police officers and people in general would be incapable of this. Bigotry is an evil contained only in a few bad individuals, after all.

Are there no hotlines?

This woman bares her soul and she finds only a feeble response that all but mocks how a survivor might feel on stumbling onto the all too copious and common words of pitiable fools on the Internet. They’re “Internet people”- which means they aren’t real, right? They aren’t part of our society, they do not socialise within it, they do not vote or otherwise have an impact on their social worlds. They are merely “Internet people” and if a rape survivor finds herself triggered or wounded, reminded of the shame and the filth that is made to cling to her when one of these “Internet people” pours misogynist scorn upon those who dare to survive and dare to say they have been raped… well she’s just being silly, isn’t she?

After all, are there no hotlines?

To pick up that phone as your hand shakes, as you find yourself struggling to not take up a knife instead of a mobile, is an exercise in will whose difficulty is hard to quantify. To do this means something critical that this man completely elided: you have to admit that you were raped and that you belong to the class of people these hotlines were designed for. Admitting that takes some people months, even years. Admitting it makes you part of that shamed class of people, opening yourself up to incessant second guessing by everyone around you, even those who may call themselves feminist will eventually be guilty of doing this to someone. Far easier, one thinks, to pretend one was not raped in the hopes that the pain will go away. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t because one does not heal by giving a patriarchal society the silence it begs for.

Are there no hotlines?

This also says nothing of the fact the resources that do exist for rape survivors are not distributed equally. As Sady Doyle has pointed out, RAINN, one of the largest anti-rape organisations in the United States, supports organisations that deny assistance to transsexual and transgender women. To be trans in this society is to court shame already, you grow up being told none too subtly that your identity makes you a freak, unworthy of life. To add being raped to this is beyond unbearable, it is a pain that these foregoing words do a poor job of describing but that I have seen first hand in my own life through those I love most. The anguish that comes with admitting you’ve been raped is already hard. Doing so when your rape was framed by your rapist as gleeful transphobia is even harder. You know right away that even if you live in some supposed oasis that white cis progressives adore, like Portland, Toronto, New York, or San Francisco, that you will deal with police officers who will automatically assume the worst of you, who think you’re a lunatic just for being trans, and that your rape was just desserts for being such a freak.

But after all, are there no hotlines?

Are there no laws?

Are there no crisis centres?

On and on the echoes can go, and it is quite clear, as it was in the case of Ebenezer Scrooge that the pitiable questions that queried about ‘some resource’ were a feeble effort at ignoring social responsibility and the enormity of the great crisis before him that his wealth was, in part, responsible for. The existence of rape culture is everyone’s responsibility. Through feeble gestures like that of the gentleman whose words I’ve mocked throughout this piece we try to deflect responsibility, whether we are women or men, cis or trans, we may find ourselves doing this. Let the hotlines take care of the poor victims, let the law take care of the evil people who rape. Just like a nice and neat Law & Order: SVU episode the drama is over at an appointed time, the TV set is switched off, and we go on with our lives. Any time a thought of the want and ignorance in the rape culture of our society intrudes upon our minds we can simply hum to ourselves:

Well, are there no hotlines?

It’s Time I Said Something

Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

Trigger Warning: Explicit discussion of rape and rape apologism follows.

Often is the time that I wish I could update this space every day with thoughts on every topic under the sun, a constant celebration of what is good in the world, and tireless fusillades against what is not. For reasons of both self-care and lack of energy, I simply cannot, however. Yet my silence on one issue is glaring and it is time I said something, regardless of how exhausted I may be feeling right now and how ever much I may just be feeling a burning drive to forget the world exists for a while.

This is not a post about Julian Assange. It is a post that was inspired by Sady Doyle’s bone-shaking message of defiance on her blog yesterday pertaining to her ongoing quest to wrest apologies from two rich white cis men in the media who see fit to tweet personal information about potential rape victims, Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore. This relates to the Assange case, yes, but the reason this case has become such a line in the sand for many feminists is because of the broader social issues that this case touches on, and which, for all the media hullabaloo about Assange and his accusers, has not been discussed substantively by most mainstream outlets.

Doyle’s post is worth reading, to say the very least. The anodyne, lifeless words I just spoke will not do justice to what I am about to quote:

“I WILL NOT GO AWAY. WE WILL NOT GO AWAY. Because all of those women, all of those GODDAMNED WOMEN, all of those GODDAMNED RAPE VICTIMS and people who file rape allegations, they ALL got scared away in EXACTLY THIS MANNER. Using these SAME GODDAMNED TACTICS. They all had to go away, no matter what happened to them, they all just got scared until they went away, and for them, for their sake, because of everything they suffered, I am going to stand outside of Michael Moore’s tower with my megaphone until he comes. Somebody has to stand out here, somebody has to be the one that just won’t go away. Somebody fucking has to do it. Because those women matter.”

Thus I’m going to set those words aside tonight. Because what she has said is fucking true, and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops, the parapets, the mountains, foothills, hillocks, and goddess-damned anthills.

One of my closest and dearest friends, a woman to whom I owe my life, and indeed many aspects of the woman I became were cultivated by her, was raped by someone she trusted. The consent she gave was abused far beyond the limits she set out and she endured having things done to her that she did not ask for her, hearing poisonous words that haunt her to this day as the man who violated her flaunted what he was doing. She hasn’t reported this because of the institutional prejudices that would shoot down any attempt at prosecution, both because of what kind of woman she is, and the kind of sex she consented to have with this man.

So many forces in this world tell women like her, bright Polarises of humanity, that they stopped mattering the moment they were raped. Powerful people think nothing of using and dismissing her, dismissing what happened, hoping she’ll shut up and go away. This man told her she didn’t matter; the police would very likely tell her the same thing.

In the spirit of Sady Doyle’s words, Ms. T, you matter. You matter so goddamn much, you mean the world to me, you illuminated my life and you continue to do so to this very day. I cannot repay, ever, what you have given to me. This green Earth would be a lesser place without you.

These are words that I have told her in snippets, scattered puzzle pieces of the total whole of my love for her and who she is. She likely cannot read this post because of the PTSD that this bastard left her with, and I’d never ask her to revisit this tragedy- so she’ll hear my words in private and in person. But this proclamation of mattering, of love, deserves to be up in lights as well because we still lack the sheer number of outlets telling survivors of rape that they matter, enough to counteract the many forces tacitly and explicitly telling them that they do not.

Those four horrible letters, PTSD, cannot begin to encompass the enormity of life changes that rape visits upon someone. Read through the comments on Sady Doyle’s post as well, many survivors came forward, and their stories are moving. One woman who said she had to live an altered life while her rapist walked free as if nothing happened perfectly echoed a lament from my friend. A lament I have heard too many times from her, when the pain becomes too much to bear. The agony that she fights with every day because of the sense of worthlessness imposed upon her, both by the rape, and by broader social discourses that impose themselves on women is something I cannot put into mere words.

The pain I feel when she is triggered, when she’s crying out to the universe begging for the hurt to stop, for things to go back to the way they were… it’s a fraction of what she endures every day as a survivor. What this man did to her was to make her life such that it’s become an act of courage for her to go out and buy snacks for herself. She cannot forget what happened to her, she cannot enjoy crowds the way she used to, cannot enjoy touch. This happened because she was a woman in a society like ours, and a woman of trans experience; the sense of emptiness rape heaps on you is unbearable, the shame, the agony. I had to tell her, as my own body quaked with a fear that filled my voice, that her life was still worth living as she held a kitchen knife in her hand, teetering on the edge of snuffing that bright spark she embodies forever.

I say all of this because what has been lost in discussions about Assange’s accusers is any real discussion about rape and how women, cis and trans, experience it in our society. The shame and the silence it inculcates keeps the volume of such discussion somewhere slightly above mute and ensures that people think it’s perfectly fine to have a jolly good debate about whether or not doing something sexual to a woman without her consent is rape. While cadres of men wring their hands about withdrawing consent after its given, I have a friend who is still picking up the pieces of her life- and she’s succeeding, damnit, she’s making something of herself every passing day. But no thanks to them, no thanks to the Keith Olbermanns of the world, nor the other so-called progressive men who become Sir Robin and bravely turn tail when challenging social issues of gender arise.

This is not truly about Assange at the end of the day, and fools who think that the unique circumstances of his spearheading of Wikileaks are enough to ring-fence this and say nothing whatsoever at any time to do with sexism has entered the discussion about his accusers and the rape-accusations against him are people I have next to no patience for. I remained silent on this in part because many people were saying what I have tried to say here better than I could. But what Doyle reminded me of was precisely what I have just said, this is not about Julian Assange nor specifically about his accusers: it’s about a society where women who have been raped, or who even dare to use the criminal justice system to get justice after they have been raped, are automatically slandered and disbelieved. The first thought is about how they might be fucking some man over, rather than ever considering the possibility that they are telling the truth. How these women have been treated is how the vast majority of women, especially those who are fully divested of personhood by the state like trans women, sex workers, and immigrant women, are treated when they stand up and grant utterance to their experience with an eye towards justice.

For my friend, Ms. T, for everyone Sady mentioned on her blog, for everyone who responded their with their own tales, and for the armies of survivors around the world who cannot speak, I stand up and say enough is enough.

  • I am sick to death of men coming into every public discussion about rape and putting the words “Duke” and “Lacrosse” together in his post explaining why he’s entitled to shame and mistrust survivors.
  • I am tired of folks quoting a long refuted study about how supposedly 50% of all women lie about rape.
  • I am beyond tired of hearing “innocent until proven guilty” when I never said anything about presuming guilt, only about understanding and putting a premium on the victim’s pain and experience and the fact that she wants to kill herself, because it fucking matters.
  • I am sick to death of men talking about how women get a kick out of getting ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ in a courtroom, as if accusing someone of rape, especially someone who is well liked, is the easiest goddamn thing in the world to do for which there are no emotional and physical consequences.
  • I am tired of people getting on my ass about how I think all men are rapists when I never once in my life have said that.
  • I am sick to death of people making extremely pathetic and tired excuses for anything bad that happens to a transsexual or transgender woman.
  • I am tired beyond words of arguing against people who try to find some way to prove that a woman brought a rape on herself by doing or not doing x, y, and z.
  • I utterly despise and am sick of men who say that talking about rape culture is ‘misandrist’ or man-hating in any context.
  • For that matter I’ve just about had it with people who say there’s no such thing as rape culture despite the fact that we see its workings laid bare Oz-style in every high profile drama about rape, or despite the fact that people like Sady Doyle have to endure high velocity shit sprayed at her in the windtunnel of Twitter threatening her with rape and other harm for speaking out.
  • I’m sick and tired of people who think trigger warnings are hi-larious and represent “political correctness gone mad.”
  • I’m sick of people who believe there is such a thing as “political correctness” and that it protects people like rape victims andor PTSD-suffers when it seems the only ‘correct’ thing to do in these peoples’ minds is mock them.
  • I’m sick and tired of comic artists who make fun of rape survivors.
  • I’m sick and tired of men who heap nothing but scorn on survivors and people who try to help them, then compare paying alimony to being raped in a disgusting bid for sympathy for their right wing agenda.
  • Indeed, I’m sick of anyone who gets very squeamish talking about actual fucking rape but liberally compares anything they don’t like to rape to drive home how much they think being overcharged 50 cents at Pizza Hut or getting sniped in TF2 by a hacking player sucks.
  • I’m tired of people who think prison rape is little more than risque humour.
  • I’m tired of people who forget that both trans and cis women are raped in prison too.
  • I’m *really* tired of people who think prison rape is a ‘just punishment.
  • I’m bloody well tired of people who think sex workers can’t be raped.
  • I want to scream at people who think sex workers being raped is funny, cause to make a shitty pun, or is somehow ‘to be expected.’ As if rape just happens, you know?
  • I’m very peeved with people who think that feminists want to take all the ‘spontaneity’ out of sex by calling for people to be more certain about consent.
  • I’m tired of people who say “Yeah rape is a horrible thing, but…” and then proceed to say something that entirely minimises and/or erases why rape is so horrible.
  • I’m tired of people assuming that if a man is found not guilty of a rape that it must mean the accusing woman lied maliciously in some golddigging effort to extract revenge of some kind. Rather than, say, the fact that the police may have picked up the wrong man.

The fact that I can make this list go on and on is troubling to me on a very deep level. I was not my usual eloquent self tonight, but this post is a cry of outrage, of anger, and a firmly pronounced willingness to permanently commit to this space the fact that I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. All rape victims deserve better than the very abridged foregoing list of bullshit rape apologism I’ve laid out just now. They deserve to have more people speaking out and proclaiming loudly that the way we as a society deal with rape is deeply flawed and perpetuates oppression. People who say that rape culture doesn’t exist because we criminalise rape clearly have not bothered to listen much when a woman does try to make use of such laws to have her assailant face justice.

Ms. Doyle’s words could very well be my own:

“You all matter to me. I don’t care if they say you don’t matter. I don’t care if they act like you don’t matter. I don’t care what they do to us, to all of us, all of the shit they do to make it possible to discredit and bully us and make us too scared to report, all of the misinformation they spread — it’s not rape if it started out consensual, it’s not rape if it happened while you were unconscious, it’s not rape if you’ve had sex with him before, it’s not rape if you hang out with the guy later, it’s not rape if you love him, it’s not rape if you like him, it’s not rape if it happens to you because you’re worthless, these are all lies – because it doesn’t change the fact that you matter.”

Rock on, sister.

Outside: An Exodus From Patriarchy on the Backs of Women

Katherine Alejandra Cross5 Comments
Intersectionality is often lost on those who most need to make certain connections.

The operation of Kyriarchy in its peculiarly patriarchal forms never fails to impress me. As I look at a certain claque of radical feminists who claim to be fighting against a system of gender oppression in our world I find myself confronting women and men who have, in truth, merely internalised patriarchal power arrangements and are regurgitating them in a strange way. I’m speaking, of course, about radfem transphobia. Joelle Ruby Ryan, a trans woman academic, recently attended a conference in New Hampshire called Pornography as Sexual Violence. In trying to present on the often untold story of how trans pornography impacts both our community and gender in general, she found herself attacked by two transphobic feminists: Robert Jensen and Lierre Keith. Her story, passionate and quite understandably outraged in tone, can be found here.

In it she quotes at length a screed from Ms. Keith. You’ll forgive me if I decide to take a shotgun to yon barrel of fish. Some might say that it only dignifies the remarks of such people to debate them or to fisk them. I prefer, however, to think of it as providing a learning resource to someone who might find themselves oppressed or harassed by such ideas. The power of symbolic violence- the use of rank, position, privilege and entitlement to impose meaning on a subordinate person- should not be understated. I and many other trans people have learned the hard way why such arguments are wrong, but someone still struggling to find themselves and feeling vulnerable might be hurting. To me, the more responses there are to this kind of nonsense, the better. Now, on with the show.

A Journey Down a Familiar Path

Keith begins by saying the following:

Well, I’ve personally been fighting about this since 1982. I think  ‘transphobic’ is a ridiculous word. I have no strange fear of people who claim to be ‘trans.’ I deeply disagree with them, as do most radical feminists.

When I was a wee lass back in high school I used to argue with this rather tiresome Republican boy (incidentally his name was Robert as well) who one day angrily declaimed “there’s no such thing as homophobia! I’m not irrationally afraid of gay people! And ‘homo’ means same! I’m not afraid of things that are the same!” Now, I know what you’re thinking. “He has a career waiting for him in Fox News!” Quite. But secondly he sounds quite a lot like our friend here who’s supposedly from the opposite side of the political spectrum, which is not uncommon when dealing with this minority of radical feminists whose stock and trade is inverting reactionary arguments and using them against the oppressed in the guise of being anti-oppression.

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