The one where I actually raged in The Amalgamated Aggromulator
- March 26, 2017, 8:15 a.m.
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- Public
(I should say for completeness that my mom talked for a long time on the phone with the uncle who was under discussion. and I listened. He sounded much more together than the feedback from my other uncle would have indicated. That’s just a phone call from a distance, but now I must factor in the possible nature of the perspective/relationship/communication-dynamics between these two brothers . . . All is a mirror maze. Or something.)
Well, I went all thunder and lightning.
I doubt if I was truly heard, but I certainly registered. I defended the hell out of a high school friend - and I lost a high school friend over the business.
Now I’m a mix of 1) satisfied at having acted and 2) utterly . . . whatever the feeling is of looking at the same frustrating conundrum from a—better place?
Which completely does not say the part where I felt utterly awful at making someone else feel awful. The evening after the morning I found her final message and found she had blocked me was the peak for that. The feeling was like a physical hangover, like every cell in my body wanted to vomit vodka, and all of them knowing that together they made up a sinner.
Oh, the one high school friend has expressed her gratitude, and I guess there was another commenter there who was also directly affected and was grateful. So that’s good. It would be nice if that was a bigger player in my feelings.
Back off from that. I’ll say that short, I’ll say everything short, or I’ll try to and probably fail, it’s that sort of felt weather, but the rest of the world lately is there too, not just this business.
I had been feeling - better? More like as if seeing what actually happens with Trump is better than it was when I had to imagine everything and all the horrible extrapolated versions that could happen. In a sense, it is a relief to be watching a single, actual Trump Administration.
But the proposed cuts in science have gotten to me . . . and the cuts in NOAA really sucker-punched me. I was reeling for days. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The proposed NOAA cuts are centered on satellites and earth sensing and data-processing. The satellites themselves . . . Global warming grudge stuff. Rather than disputing the interpretation of the data (and imagine that the data will eventually bear them out, as they presumably think they’re right), they’re going after the actual collection of the data itself.
Now, that alone would be loony, but the part that tapped my fragile spot with a spoon was: Those same satellites and those same sensors are also used for weather prediction and tracking.
The temperatures used for weather monitoring and prediction and the temperatures used for climate change monitoring and modeling are not magically two different temperatures. It’s the same data.
I don’t know how best to say this (I’ve been spluttering over this), but:
Isn’t the very first thing you mention—if you’re talking to someone who says all this rocket and space development has been a waste of money—the huge reduction of shipping losses and loss of life from improved maritime weather prediction and hurricane prediction and tracking?
In order to do this “it’s a waste of money” hatefest toward global warming, these people are putting that at risk.
Nothing else has brought the Great Unbuilding (Through Malignant Lack Of Interest) home to me as strongly as that. It’s a stunning relationship-with-the-real-world issue.
Oh—they also want to slash other science, all over. The National Institute of Health. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy at the Department of Energy. The Center for Disease Control. (. . . Think about that.) And the Environmental Protection Agency, of course. When the anti-EPA firebrand they put in charge of the EPA went to the White House to request a lower level of cuts to the agency, $1 billion in cuts instead of $2 billion, the White House immediately responded by increasing the cuts another $300 million. What part of “the middle finger is the point” did this guy not understand? This zealot had at least noticed what had been put in his lap. This White House doesn’t care.
Now, I went on a fun tear in Prosebox awhile back about how Australia should develop its own space program. Australia doesn’t have its own landsats. It has to borrow time on U.S. satellites for its remote sensing needs, which are substantial.
Well, if this budget does pass or if further Trump-Republican efforts can be anticipated in this direction, that question should be much more on a front burner, in a much less fun way, because American satellites will not be as available.
(I note, by the way, that New Zealand is starting up its own space program. With slightly over 1/8th Australia’s GDP and 1/5th Australia’s population. Which pricked me on this subject in a different way . . . Never mind. Digressing.)
What the thunder and lightning was about:
(Any stretch of intense writing has a background reverie, for me. Throughout my whole participation in this and much of the aftermath, I’ve had the picture in my head of some sort of little clubhouse inside a hollowed-out tree, with a hinged door!)
My one high school friend, Melanie has a husband who began life as a woman and is now a man.
That’s not enough background. Here is more.
People with gender dysphoria commit suicide at very high rates, which is the worst kind of certificate of what it’s like for them.
It’s been agreed that acceptance as the gender they feel themselves to be is the best way to deal with this. Nothing else does it.
The adopting of a convention. Or recognition of an inner truth perhaps, however anyone wants to think of this, but the convention is a humane decision. The separation of the concepts of “sex” and “gender”, from there.
Now, my other (now former) friend, Lydia, and her mother—both of whom are intelligent wide-ranging progressives generally, which is what totally fries my brain—are absolutely against this, on the grounds of a particular sort of feminism—or a particular use of it.
This brand of feminism places the highest emphasis on women-only spaces, and takes the perspective of the women who find such a picture the most essential in a troubled world of women and men.
It sees trans women ONLY as men, who, if accepted, invade womanhood and, dangerously and practically, invade women’s spaces.
They absolutely deny and oppose trans women. (Trans men they ignore, but it’s a very malign neglect; they are doing the same thing to the trans men because they’re absolutely denying trans.)
So Lydia and her mom have been posting things in their Facebooks that . . . well, I made myself very clear in a comment on one of Lydia’s postings early on, the first such one I saw, but other than that I hadn’t said anything else since; I tend to think it’s bad and presumptuous to come in and keep strafing another person’s personal page out of disagreement . . . But I’ve been saving some of the posts to email to my friend Christy and talk about incredulously with her.
A background here is that I went through a period of a couple of months a year or so ago extensively reading this stripe of opposition to trans people.
It included astounding things. Accusations that trans women are really autogynephiliacs who hide raging erections under their newspapers, or talk that trans people “erase women” (for all the criticism of gender “essentialism”, this is an absolutely savage essentialism that dare not speak its name), or sincere and angry statements that trans is the patriarchy intentionally arranging to send men into women’s sanctuaries, or eager postings of lurid news stories about cross-dressing male predators in public toilets or trans women in female prisons said to be behaving abusively in showers - by plaintiffs, women who may be of like minds. I remember one person saying that trans women are men and all men rape and kill. Phobic rabid fearful stuff.
So this friend Lydia and her mother had been posting things . . . They didn’t post everything I’ve seen in those latitudes, but they posted things that drew absolutely no shower curtain against those other horrible things.
And a very frequent thing they posted about was a particular theoretical framing under which “gender” is only a nonsense patriarchal construct, and that if people discarded those ideas and preconceptions the whole trans issue would just disappear as nonsense.
Why couldn’t men who wanted to wear women’s clothes just wear them and just be whoever they wanted to be . . . with no more talk about changing bodies, and no more talk about really being women?
. . . When trans people’s endless talk about having the wrong bodies and really being the other gender is absolutely core.
(The trans people I’ve known don’t care beans about traditional gender roles or dress categories. It’s not about that. When trans people have dressed in the manner of the opposite sex, it’s been reaching in some way for the reality as they see it.)
And with, again, the extremely high suicide rates, to show the power and real seriousness of this dysphoria centered on being of the other gender and in the wrong body.
So, in the face of that, this stripe of feminist is . . . doing this. Here are two examples in Facebook meme-messages (sorry for the small print on one):
Sounds so reasonable, eh? And so much for the trans people’s benefit! “Without saying it makes them women, without surgery, without all that nonsense.” “In the bodies they are in. Without labels.”
Meaning: NO.
This is functionally a LIE about specifically denying these people exactly, precisely what they need - for reasons of one’s own (one’s own “side”) - giving them ZERO, nothing of the thing they inconveniently need, except only perhaps, “Try not committing suicide”.
Wilfully FALSIFYING the situation to make it seem like nothing so merciless is being done, like there should really be no issue.
Very much like mind-bending recastings I’ve heard from white people about what black complaints are really about.
With suicides at stake.
Can you see why my eyes would have acquired a red glow?
(In the final exchanges before she cut contact, Lydia expressed hurt at my lack of acknowledgement of her sympathy for gender dysphoria. Oh, I’m sure she felt sympathy about it. And may the gods protect me from this kind of sympathy.)
(People do vary, in this area and all others, and Lydia sent me a link to an essay by a self-identifying trans woman who did not claim to be really female and who had managed to come to terms by thinking in precisely my friend’s stripe of gender-politics conception. [The meme-image above, of course, showcases another such person, who cross-dresses but does not claim to be female and does not consider trans women to be a different case.] You can find a few of anyone, if you look hard. Hurt, she told me that she admired this person. Yes. She admired THESE ones. For thinking this way. Have all the other trans people simply not thought about things the right way, in their pain and their, again, suicides; have they all stuck with talk of really being the other sex out of mere lack of cleverness?)
(What is maddening just on an intellectual level: There’s nothing that requires the thing that happens with trans people to have anything to do with the cultural gender phenomena that radical feminists like this are critiquing . . . and, contrariwise, it not having anything to do with that wouldn’t weaken or invalidate that critique or body of ideas in the slightest! They are simply separate!) (And there are radical feminists who know that, who don’t have a problem with any of this, because they are separate!)
I’ve gotten out of sequence.
So, to recue:
There’s this one friend from high school, Melanie, who has a trans male husband. Melanie posted a link to an interview with Laverne Cox.
Lydia came in talking about ” Hey, Melanie, this is exactly where we disagree. I think transwomen have a very different experience to women born as women . . .” based on one’s experience of oppression, and saying “Remove gender constructs and we have no problem.” It could have been worse, but it was unsolicited, and utterly casual in a way that was completely tone-deaf given Melanie’s situation, and this wheedling little attack on woman-ness on the different-life-experience ground—and, as I read it, I knew what was behind it.
And Lydia cheerily added that it was important to have the conversation!
And, in fact, Melanie was appalled when she saw Lydia’s comments. She felt very attacked. And, Melanie told me later that one of the other commenters who was there, who I didn’t know, is raising an M-to-F child.
Melanie protested that in her opinion Laverne Cox is a real woman and always has been. Which Lydia wouldn’t hear; which wouldn’t work.
(I had actually already been a little radioactive on the Lydia/Melanie front—ever since once, a long time before, I saw Lydia comment on Melanie’s page and guardedly mention to Melanie differences between them. Melanie responded in good humor and had no idea what it was about. I did. So only to me did what Lydia said then sound like something brittle and diplomatic said across the Berlin Wall.)
And when I saw Melanie’s horrified, defensive response to Lydia’s comments . . .
I went Vesuvius. No. I went Krakatoa.
I—explained the enormity of the deliberate misconceiving, to hide the nature of the denial. I spoke of Lydia’s tone-deaf lack of empathy. I don’t know why I’m not just pasting what I wrote in; maybe I’m a little afraid of it. I spoke with fury. I was clear—but I was throwing bookcases.
Lydia responded in a very neutral voice-of-reason tone, to Melanie and to me. She invited me to talk with her on these issues on her page, and said that she’d had no idea I was so upset.
I was having none of it. I told her that she had misphrased me: I was not “so upset”; I was angry with her. I was not upset at seeing things that bothered me; I was angry at her because I thought she’d done something wrong.
( I cannot remember EVER going there before. I did, and I said why.)
I rejected her civility because of the monstrous incivility involved in the twisted representations. She had quoted a “right-thinking” (in her view) trans person in her response to Melanie. I told her that the nicer-sounding parts of those words she’d quoted didn’t guarantee a damn thing against the ugliness.
It finished later in private messages. At first Lydia wrote me a long explanation—assuming I had only read my own “circles,” and saying I should really read her side (I don’t have circles, and her side was ALL I HAD read)—talking about how male harassment is a constant for women (and completely, seamlessly combining trans women with that—and my very feminist friend Christy, who has certainly been sexually harassed a great deal, finds that as outrageous as I do)—and confirming that “trans women negate women”—and talking about statistics that purportedly showed that trans women are sexually aggressive and demanding and predatory. Pretty much all the stuff she hadn’t shown before.
And she claimed she had never portrayed the nature of trans the way I was saying.
I responded by quoting times she’d posted things that pointed exactly that direction.
The next morning I found a last message, sad in tone, that said she no longer considered me a friend, and that I didn’t seem to have any empathy for her. And that I seemed to care only about gender dysphoria.
On that last bit, I can see why I seemed to her like that, with her giving them ZERO and INSISTING they get zero of what they DESPERATELY NEEDED and thinking that she had sympathy for them.
I wrote her a last message in response, and then when I was done I found I couldn’t send it because, yes, she’d actually blocked me.
I was calmer and said I was not happy about the heat, that I didn’t regret anything I’d said or the reason, but that I was sorry if she could no longer consider me a friend.
Here’s what I said, particularly in response to her saying that I seemed to only care about dysphoria:
I don't really have the energy for this sort of thing either, but I should answer that.
The dysphoria, and the suicide rates associated with it... what you think of as being sympathetic about that, and as your moderation, *cannot play* as that given the nature of the line that you are drawing.
You may see the trans advocates as saying [this is my hypothetical framing, not hers], "Given the pain of the dysphoria, etc., if acceptance of trans women leads to an attack in a women's bathroom that wouldn't have happened, 1. that's not the idea, but 2. tough." They may see you as saying, "Given the possibility of an attack in a women's bathroom, if a trans woman faces a wall of non-acceptance as a woman and commits suicide when she wouldn't have, 1. that's not the idea, but 2. tough."
The difference is that one of these would directly hurt every member of the other group. By the nature of the "don't call yourself a woman," "you're not a woman."
You've confirmed, to my surprise, the frame that "Any man who things he feels like he is a woman is a woman. Therefore being a woman is purely an idea. It's meaningless." I just cut a bit about how this minimizes the seriousness of trans women's experience, because we're not going to continue this. But I see this as a distortion that may be a sign that part of this is an intrinsic non-rational rejection of the whole idea. (Non-rational not as pejorative but as description.)
(Lydia, I must tell you that I don't believe the part about female body parts, physical facts, not being allowed to be mentioned in trans-including lesbian groups because it's not inclusive, although I believe you do. I've also read a very sincere claim that LGBT groups are no longer accepting merely cis lesbians, and I don't believe that either. Those . . . well, I'll snip how I think those happen.)
This may dilute your sense of how merciless it is to have "you are not a real woman" as a hard indispensable part of your defensive line. But given the nature of the situation, it *is* merciless. It *can't not* be. And,the way you've taken things up, that part isn't your problem.
I described you as I did because of the casual way you came in and said what you said to Melanie. I do not think you had a sense of what that would be to her and how she would react. I still am not sure you realize. I'll always get angry at that.
Goodbye, Lydia. If we're not friends now, I am sorry that that's so.
Amazement . . . and the sickness (I can’t stay mad - sympathy for Lydia returns - she meant well, or, she meant to mean well) . . . and the other undeniable, amazing lack of regret at such a raging - and a frustrated dissatisfaction. A new place.
Thunder and lightning is an ability of mine—and, evidently, a latent propensity—but it is not what I am always trying to do. It bugs me. The Rational Explainer is now looking regretfully at the work of the Firebrand. (Probably also the Editor looking at the work of the Writer.)
The Rational Explainer is a diehard believer in miracle rational unlockings (of course, or that wouldn’t be the emphasis). Keep thinking of the perfect key for the lock. If I could do a one-week Peggy Sue Got Married regression, with foreknowledge of how things went this time, and put the crux points up front and clearly this time, in a tone she’d have listened to…
But what made an impact wasn’t my points, it was me throwing bookcases.
And we wouldn’t have done better than no-progress point-counterpoint. With Melanie having this crap on her page, and inadequately defended.
And the real points to make clear were how I saw the two enormities:
1) Giving people who are massive suicide risks for one particular reason nothing but, “Well, how about you don’t commit suicide? But that reason stays put.”
2) Tidying 1) over with a b.s. formulation under which there’s no real problem.
Like telling, say, male homosexuals, “The reality is you don’t have vaginas for penises, so how about you marry women and acknowledge that gay is mistaken, and just don’t feel obligated to like football and realize it’s totally okay if a normal man likes show tunes?”
Anger is a key part of explaining enormities.
And I wouldn’t have f—ing DONE it if not for anger. The rational me recognizes clear hopelessness (and avoids wasting time and fears making things worse). Rage is anger getting WINGS from hopelessness.
It’s just that we live in an age of massive over-use of thunderbolts and thinking in terms of thunderbolts, with all of the drawbacks. :-(
And - still.
Me she was wrong about, about me not having empathy for her. I do care about her side. I don’t want frightened women to be in situations that threaten them. Were it not for this, women, feminists of any outlook, could do whatever they wanted, the whole spectrum, separatism, walled stockades, anything. Any way of dealing. None of that sort of thing would be a problem at all if it weren’t for the Syrian refugees. I mean the trans people. The FACT of them. They force this other look. But what’s then seen sure isn’t their fault.
I wrote Christy a couple of times, processing, after describing all this. I’ll show part of one.
Where I think the difference lies between their feminism and, oh, I'll just call it your feminism (though I think it would include me):
**"WE MAKE REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS."**
I think I'd want to call "your" feminism a very *American* feminism, because it posits an aspirational justice that women are supposed to be accorded. A *general* justice. The feminist focus is on women reaching that, but EVERYBODY is supposed to get a bite at that apple. (The historical black civil rights movement had the same pattern.) So women's rights and trans rights are both subjects of inquiry and exist, and you have no problem with women (like men) making reasonable accommodations for trans people, as we all make reasonable accommodations for each other. The idea is to reach an optimum full tapestry of fulfillment.
In the TERF version of radical feminism, there isn't really one "WE", and there isn't really a peacetime in which that picture can be worked out. In regard to men and women there are two "we"s, and women constantly navigate an ocean full of the periscopes of male penis U-boats. "Justice for both women and trans, and men too and everybody" is something for an imaginary world; justice for women is because women support women.
This situation really seems to me to cast a spotlight on a differentiation of personalities within the feminist spectrum. There are a lot of women who react to the picture with relatively more fear and suspicion of males, or with extreme amounts. And, just the same as with the "women-only-spaces" emphasis that accompanies them, any version of it, separatism, anything, if it weren't for this situation *it wouldn't matter*, I would *have no reason* to object or to throw stones in any way—what *is or isn't* a sane reaction to rape and male-dominant bullshit, anyway?
Some problems with some resulting *manifestations* that might be fed by those people, yes, like wartime-conceived "justice" views (at an extreme, because of male behavior, male bias, and victim treatment, all rape accusations should be required to be taken to be true and if any man were falsely convicted he should be proud to make the sacrifice for the war on rape or else fuck him) or icy tilts that don't do much but reinforce the picture that they already take to be true. But *mostly I would just feel sorry for the more fearful women in the mix.*
But bring in the question of trans people, and the fearful people and the advocates personally most at home with that approach are suddenly - and I suddenly feel OK using such a pejorative term - the Typhoid Marys for TERFism, and for the most nasty phrasings of it.
I don’t know.
It is enraging. And I raged. And, astoundingly, I don’t regret raging. It meant I acted. And I defended someone. I got called “chivalrous”. But I didn’t perform a miracle, and I lost a high school friend, and here I am, and this is apparently me.
Last updated March 26, 2017
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