In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: March 2015

You’re a lesbian? Prove it.

TRIGGER WARNING: VIOLENT HOMOPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, PROBABLY RACISM

That’s what you have to do if you’re seeking asylum in the UK. Perhaps your family and your partner of 20 years have been killed. Perhaps you’re sentenced to stoning in your country of origin. Perhaps you jump through the necessary hoops and produce private, personal photographs and even a video of your sexual activities.

Is that good enough? Have you proven you’re a lesbian yet?

Apparently not to the government prosecutors of the UK.

Maybe you foolishly took measures to try and save your own life in Nigeria–tried to live undercover, married a man, even had kids (I mean, everybody knows lesbians can’t have kids, right? And real lesbians have never dated a man ever in their lives. Hey, maybe if you just explained you were bisexual, that sentence of stoning would be commuted!). Maybe you made the, um, “mistake” of “looking feminine” in Nigeria, either because you were femme or because you didn’t want to be killed. (Everybody knows lesbians never look feminine, right?)

A judge is ruling on Aderonke Apata’s case in weeks.

In my opinion, this is about the intersection of misogyny, homophobia, heterosexism (ever had a penis in your vagina? that penis is so powerful that it makes you straight no matter what else you’ve experienced.), anti-immigration sentiment, and yes, racism. It’s about the devaluing of a woman’s life, the dismissal of her trauma and of her identity because her lesbian experience doesn’t conform to some prosecutorial ideal, because she’s black, and because she’s an immigrant. Apata’s lesbianism is on trial, and 10 bucks says it’s not other lesbians who are ruling on it. (That wouldn’t make it OK, but there’s something particularly grotesque about a bunch of straight people sitting around passing judgment on whether or not somebody is a “real” lesbian and deciding that she doesn’t measure up to their bigoted white-centered stereotypes.)

Asylum for Aderonke Facebook page.

UK taxes are paying for these insults, just as my taxes go to the right-wing’s faith-based initiatives here in the US and the racist war on drugs and suchlike. And yet forced-birthers whine that they shouldn’t have to fund abortion because they “morally object” to it. Well, I morally object to any number of things in my own country, and what the UK is doing to Apata.

Q&A: Crowdfunding feminism into media…

Women’s representation in media is actually growing worse, not better, and women still comprise a fraction of directors off-screen. Unsurprisingly, some of the more feminist media we’ve seen in recent years – Tropes vs. Women, Veronica Mars and Hunting Ground – have been funded through alternative means or produced independently, to avoid creative interference by misogynistic studio suits. In this post, I interview one woman who’s ended up using the crowdfunding model to work on her upcoming Slut: A Documentary Film…

Spillover #26

Time for our twenty-sixth #spillover thread. Some reminders:

1. #spillover is part of our comment moderation system for keeping other threads on-topic by providing a separate constructive space for side-discussions.
2. Commentors are encouraged to respect the topic of each post and cheerfully volunteer to take off-topic side-discussions into #spillover.

Breaking: charges in the murder of Islan Nettles

TRIGGER WARNING: VIOLENCE AGAINST TRANS WOMEN

James Dixon has been charged with manslaughter in the 2013 murder of Islan Nettles, a young black trans woman in NYC. He is pleading not guilty. The crime is not being charged as a hate crime because the police say they cannot tell what was said before Dixon beat Nettles to death, but no motive beyond transmisogyny transmisogynoir has been suggested.

Insofar as one can be pleased about anything in this situation, I am glad that Nettles’s death was not allowed to pass unnoticed and ignored by the city, and I am glad to say that the linked NYT article genders her correctly, although it refers to her gender identity as her “sexual orientation.” It is unclear to me whether this is a result of ignorance, a mistake, or because “sexual orientation” is included as a protected category in NY’s hate crimes law and gender identity is not, though gender is.

I don’t have anything analytical to say about this, but I remember how upsetting this murder was to many of us here, and I wanted to update the community.

Alternative Family Structures: The Baby Book Edition

If you’re part of an non-conventional family and about to welcome a new child, finding a baby book is…probably the last thing on your mind, actually, as you have a million and one other things to think about.

But it was really preying on my mother’s mind. She didn’t want me to have to get a baby book with a traditional family tree, one side of which would be left blank, and no spaces to write down the baby’s real family, i.e. the friends with whom I live. So she went searching, and she found me this:

Welcome to the World Baby Memory Book: Celebrating All Families

It seems to be out of print, but it is a sweet book. It does not ask you to specify your baby’s (presumed) gender, and the family page is perfect for a family like mine. Instead of a tree, there are two pages with spaces to list the baby’s family members’ names, their relationship to the baby, and to add notes of anything you want about them, arranged in a column. With that set-up, there’s not even enough room for all of the baby’s family–never mind about an entirely blank page where the father’s side of the family might be.

So I thought I’d give the book a little love here. It’s not without a problem–while most of the illustrations are of cute little animals, there are a few of babies, and I would have preferred that those illustrations not be of only white babies–so it’s not going work comfortably for everybody by far. But it’s something.

Punished for fleeing abuse

CONTENT NOTE: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; FORCED SEPARATION OF MOTHER AND CHILD

Nan-Hui Jo, a South Korean woman, came to the US to study. She met her former partner, Jesse Charlton, and had a child with him, a little girl named Vitz Da. And in 2009, after suffering repeated violence and abuse, in an effort to save herself and her daughter, Jo took her child and went back to South Korea. Charlton sent her threats, including one of employing a “nasty bounty hunter,” and publicly admitted his violent abuse of his former partner, including that he grabbed her around the throat and threw her against a wall.

Upon her return to the US in 2014 (nothing I’ve found has said why), Jo was immediately arrested and separated from her daughter. She was tried for child abduction and the trial resulted in a hung jury. The DA has opted for a retrial, ignoring the violence and abuse to which Charlton subjected Jo. And even if she is found not guilty, she will be subject to immediate deportation and thus continued separation from the daughter she tried to protect.

This case is at the crossroads of so many of the important challenges facing feminism today: the racism and xenophobia towards a foreign woman of color, who is being accused of trying to use Charlton for a green card (never mind that she fled back to South Korea); the lack of options facing women, particularly those who are not US citizens, in escaping abuse; the incredibly high rates of abuse incarcerated women have experienced; the persecution of women who attempt action to save themselves and their children from abuse; the refusal of our legal system to recognize that a man who abuses the mother of his children is no fit parent. It seems to me that, as with the case of Marissa Alexander, we as feminists need to support Nan-Hui Jo and make crystal clear the traps she has been caught in.

More details can be found here, at the Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse’s site.
A Facebook page in support of Nan-Hui Jo can be found here.

Here is a Tumblr feed giving a play-by-play of what is happening in the courtroom.

Various actions and petitions can be found at these sites.

Trans women and the future

CONTENT NOTE: VIOLENCE AGAINST TRANS WOMEN; DISCUSSION OF RAPE

This article, by Kai Cheng Tom, is a moving and beautifully written piece about what it means to be a young trans woman of color and to read over and over again about the violent death of women like you.

I have argued for years that male rape of women is a terrorist act, reminding all women what men can do to us, how vulnerable we are, how we have no way to exist in safety in this world. That the knock-on effects of one woman’s rape extends to her family and friends (if she feels comfortable enough to share the story) and beyond, if the news media picks it up. I do not mean to imply by this that survivors of rape should keep quiet or that rape should not be reported in the news. The problem is not knowledge. The problem is rape.

I gave up an extra unpaid job writing for a local Queens newspaper more than fifteen years ago because I was having to cover community board meetings etc. that took place in the evening, and thus had to take the G train back home to Brooklyn late at night. The G train ran seldom and was usually empty, and this was just the time that a man dubbed by the local news as “the G-train rapist” was operating. So much for a career in journalism.

Edit: I think this kind of unremitting, unrelenting violence against trans women is also terrorism. Look at the effects on the trans women who are not its direct victims. Look at the way Kai Cheng Tom has to live in fear, how hard it becomes to envision a future free of that violence and the fear of it. I felt something that I think is a little similar when I was 18 and I started to find out how many of my friends had been raped: I started to think that being raped was inevitable. But as a cis white woman, I had many more resources for support, ways to help me move past that feeling.

And at least I could give up that job–women who had paid jobs late at night on the G line couldn’t. And what are trans women supposed to do? Stop being?

Trans women need a future. They deserve a future. So what I’m posting here is a link to a piece on trans people over 50. Some transitioned later, some earlier. But they’re still here, still living, still making lives and happiness. If we are all lucky, this is what the future looks like.

Edited because I lost the thread originally and forgot to make the parallel between rape of cis women and transmisogynist violence that I was trying to create clear. Sorry about that. That’s what I get for composing directly on-site instead of drafting.