Hooray for corporate responsibility

... and this time, I'm not being sarcastic.

The Sacramento Bee (again, one of the greatest names for a newspaper) has a story by writer Bill Lindelof about a bunch of corporations pulling their ads from a Sacto radio show after the show's hosts made some prety nasty comments about transgendered people (calling them, among other things, "freaks with mental disorders", as the article reports).

So good on Bank of America, Verizon, Chiptole, and even hyper-masculine Carl's Jr. Of course, the good news here is in the change that it represents in the wider culture. These companies would not have pulled their ad money without being certain that it would have a tangible economic benefit-- implying that a majority of people wouldn't condone this kind of ignorant prattle.

From the linked article:

During a May 28 show, one of the three hosts said he would hit his child with his shoe if the boy wanted to wear high heels. Another said he would tell a boy he was "a little idiot" if he asked to wear a dress.

"If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him," said Arnie States, co-host of the "Rob, Arnie & Dawn" show, which usually airs mornings on KRXQ in Sacramento.

Justice for Angie?

While I was at school today, the verdict in the Angie Zapata trial came in--guilty on all four counts.

From Questioning Transphobia:

* Count 1: First degree murder - guilty
* Count 2: Bias motivated crime - guilty
* Count 3: Aggravated motor vehicle theft (1st degree) - guilty
* Count 4: ID theft - guilty

Sentencing for the first count: mandatory life without parole.
Sentencing on the remaining three counts will take place on May 8th at 3PM MST.

To me, the most important part of this verdict isn't just the conviction for murder. Great, we're admitting that a transgender woman IS fully human--is not a thing or a monster, killing her is in fact murder.

But what matters to me is the "bias motivated crime" charge. The fact that a jury convicted Andrade of a hate crime, that they not only didn't buy his argument of "victimization" but they saw that killing Angie because she was transgender is a hate crime, pure and simple.

Like several bloggers and others that commented on Twitter, I know "justice" can't ever really be done in cases like this. Angie isn't back. Her killer will go to prison, but the prison system is itself horribly screwed up. Will this actually change the treatment of transgender women by the media, the legal system, the world at large?

I suppose all we can hope for--and work for--is at least a small improvement.

Angie Zapata

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while, and I haven't been able to find the words. But after reading Emily's post at Questioning Transphobia, I have to say something.

Angie Zapata was a transgender woman killed by a man after he discovered that she was transgender. His trial just started, and the defense is attempting to, in essence, say that he deserves to be let off because she "tricked" him.

Emily writes:

Quite obviously, this clears the way for the inevitable “trans panic” defense, a form of victim blaming that only appears to have legal credibility when applied to trans people. So yes, I realise it is the defense’s job to cast doubt onto every piece of evidence that the prosecution raises, and even to attack the credibility of the victim and any material witnesses. But this is not doing that. It does not raise the question of whether Angie was of good character or not–it suggests from the start that she never could have been. This is pandering to the worst in cissexist biases, and painting transness of itself as deserving of death.

This is hate speech legitimating hate violence, pure and simple.

I agree, and I don't have much to add to her post. I wrote about this before at my blog, and there are links to the original posts about the murder here.

I wish I had anything coherent to say, but the torture memos have already fucked me up this week, so the only thing I can say is what kind of a world do we live in where it's OK to kill someone because she "tricked" you? Where that makes you a "victim"?

Transgender Day of Remembrance

In the midst of the rampant speculation and debate about policies, I've tried to stop a few times in the last couple of weeks and remember a few women who were killed recently because they were transgender.

The sad fact remains that this happens all too often.

A few others have put this far better than I can.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is not a once-a-year deal. You don't show up for services, murmur "lest we forget" and then promptly forget for the rest of the year. Today lives within us, because we cannot afford to forget.

Still. Today most of all, we remember those who were killed. Because we die violently, unmemorialised, and are mocked after our deaths.

Because the world sees us disposable, less than human (and who can mourn that?). Many of the dead lost their lives because they were trans women of colour, doubly disposable.

Who would mourn a thing, a that, an it?

-queen emily

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It's a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

--little light

I will never understand what motivates someone to kill another human being when their life is not in danger. I will never understand what it is inside someone that makes them pick up a weapon instead of simply walking away. I will never understand how human life can have so little value to some people. But I know that there are people in this world, far too many people, who can kill. Who can pick up a gun or a knife or a rock and strike out. For what? Because someone doesn't meet your expectations? Because they live their life in a way you don't approve of? Which god tells you that you can do that? Which god gives you permission? And how can the world, how can so many otherwise decent people, simply nod and say 'well, what did you expect? Not guilty!'?

--Butterfly Cauldron

oh you binary things

“I say a boring word like woman takes all the fun out of being a girl.” –Foxglove, “Death: The Time of Your Life”

Granted Neil Gaiman wrote that line, and he is definitely a guy, a straight white British guy for goodness’s sake, but I’ve been trying to think of where I read it for months now, every time I see these humorless ‘radical feminist’ arguments for some sort of vanilla world where there are no gender signifiers—which, by the way, are totally Western gender signifiers like lipstick and high heels that they’re always fighting, and not any sort of universal perception of women as weak and in need of protection constantly.

I mean, the idea that to “smash the gender binary” we have to all dress in some sort of clothing that provides no hint of the pleasing curves of our bodies, that doesn’t in any way decorate the bodies we were born with—some sort of religious asceticism that says we can’t mess with the bodies God (the Goddess, in those conversations, and often a specific Goddess that, well, wouldn’t even know what to do with those Western gender signifiers if she ran across them, but sure knows what to do with people who don’t take her seriously) gave us… Yeah.

That’s just the outward coating anyway. The lipstick, the clothes, the hair, it’s just the wrapping, and not the problem. The problem is that with the external perception “Woman” comes all sorts of other perceptions about what that woman is like, what she can and can’t do, and whether or not she’ll fuck you, quite often.

And those ideas come whether or not I’m wearing makeup, when I’m in a man’s top and vest or in a dress and heels, when my hair is short or long.

The idea, especially, that gender is a construct, a choice, a game (an idea I like, personally, a Game of You like Neil said, again, because I’m just on that kind of trip right now), would seem to preclude some sort of need to protect Biological Woman from invasion.

If you want to break down the idea that certain traits come with certain genders, why do you always want to embrace the male signifiers? To me, sometimes, I see the idea of not shaving, of not wearing skirts, as just an embrace of the things that have always been coded male and powerful, rather than any sort of re-empowering those things coded feminine, and so how does that help us any?

These thoughts, of course, have been prompted by another round of what Queen Emily called the Trans Wars. To me, well, it seems pretty damn obvious that when you’re terribly concerned about the biology of the people who call themselves women, you’re probably the one actually upholding, reifying, policing gender binaries.

I mean, I look at it two ways: One is that it ain’t my life, ain’t my gender, so who the hell am I to tell someone that how they feel is wrong, that who they are is wrong? Basic empathy for human beings can get you so much further sometimes than reading books.

And two is that if you’ve got to be an asshole and try to theorize about people’s lives, well, this still doesn’t make any sense. How is the idea that your gender doesn’t necessarily match your body anything but a plus for people who want to get rid of the gender binary? How is the thought that we aren’t trapped by our biology anything but a cheering one for feminism?

Is your oppression so important to you that you have to police it too? Is your feeling of victimhood such an important identity that you have to protect it from outsiders? Or is it just that if you set up impossible goals, you can safely assume we'll never actually reach that happy vanilla genderless utopia where we all wear what, togas? and no one has kinky sex, or any sex at all really because that might imply gender roles or objectification, oh my? And that way you just get to complain away, continue feeling like a victim, and tell anyone who doesn't feel like a victim, or who feels like the wrong kind of victim, that they're wrong?

I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere by sitting in a corner whimpering about how beaten down we are. I feel like we get somewhere when we fight back. Or sometimes when we get together and laugh, have a drink, and realize that life can still be good. Thinking about how I’ve been fucked over never made me feel strong, but putting on sparkly makeup and dancing on a bar sure has. Yeah, poor deluded me, performing for the patriarchy, right?

See, Foxglove, who said that quote, above? She’s a lesbian. And a rock star. And yes, a character on a page and in Neil Gaiman’s head (and drawn so pretty by Chris Bachalo). Clear-eyed gaze and all. So who’s she performing for when she puts on her tight skirt?

Maybe she’s just doing what makes her happy. So was Wanda, back in A Game of You, when she left behind Alvin and moved to New York. And even though when she died her family tried to force her back into being Alvin, well, Barbie (oh, Barbie you supreme tool of oppression, blonde busty doll) scrawled her real name in hot pink lipstick on her grave.

I’m not trans. And I'm straight. I like men (quite often too much). And even my gender performance is drag. After years of jeans and T-shirts suddenly I wear red lip gloss every day and dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, and I like it that way. It’s my armor and war paint and the noise that high heels make is much more satisfying to my ears these days.

And I was treated like a stupid little girl and had more assumptions made about my competence, skill, and sexual availability when I wore jeans and no makeup and worked on bicycles all day.

Policing our presentation doesn’t help. You really want to smash the binary? Fight the idea that how we look has anything at all to do with how smart we are, how competent we are, how strong we are. Fight the idea that women can only get anywhere by being just like men.

I’ve got another quote for you, this one snagged off the Twitter of a friend of mine.

“Sexiness and professionalism are both drag. The problems arise when people confuse them for honest attributes.” –Molly Crabapple

Oh, and Lisa, as usual, has much, much more.

(Cross-posted, of course)

More on Angie Zapata and violence against trans women.

1. "It."

As Cassuto noted, when people objectify others, they find it much easier both to possess and to kill them. What he meant by objectification was not sexual, but literally treating a person as an object. Cassuto also pointed out that humans are never fully able to conceive of another person as a thing, and so they enter that space in between thing and human--they become monsters.

In most of these cases (Angie Zapata's and others), the transgender woman is doubly objectified--first as a woman that the person feels entitled to, sexually (the usual feminist definition of objectification) and then when they find out that she isn't exactly what they were expecting, she becomes a thing, and thus something that can be killed--"it."

It's that very monstrosity-through-objectification that is threatening, though, because if she were simply a thing, she would no longer be frightening and need to be killed. It's the fact that she's still at once the woman he was attracted to and yet not what he's 'supposed' to be attracted to that makes her monstrous, that requires her death, that creates this 'panic' that to some people actually justifies killing another person.

2. The media.

In the news, the trans woman is both acceptable victim because she is a woman, and deserving victim because she does not fit the box that we've put 'women' into. She's another step removed from the Natalee Holloways and Laci Petersons of this world--particularly from Peterson, who was so defined by her biology, her pregnancy, her fetus, always so obsessively named in the media.

It is appropriate for a woman to be a victim of violence, and even more appropriate for a woman of color to be a victim of violence--it's expected. News coverage of violence against women goes in a hierarchy, but trans women are at the very bottom of it, (well, trans women of color sex workers would be the very bottom) and that's just wrong. It's "not a typical hate crime"? Then what else is it?

Back to the monster theory for a second--do you think that people who commit hate crimes against those of a different race than them don't have a similar process in their brains that tells them people of this other race are less human than they are, different, Other, monsters, and thus killable? Is the so-called "irrational" reaction that made this man kill a woman less a product of his hate and fear than a Klansman's hatred for black people or a Nazi's hatred for Jews?

3. Sexual assault.

As I mentioned above, Angie Zapata was doubly objectified--first as a woman. The man who killed her stated for the record(!) that he found out she had a penis by grabbing her genital area. As if it's some male right to check for himself, right? To test out the goods?

Wrong.

So this guy not only killed a woman, he sexually assaulted her first, and then stole her car, and we're supposed to believe that somehow he's the victim in this case? I mean, if I grab some guy's cock, find out he's not circumcised, am I allowed to bash his head in and then drive off with his car because it offends me as a Jewish woman?

I doubt it.

Lisa has more.

Violence against trans women.

Because I should write about it but I just can't today. I have too much to do. So please read these. And think about what happens when we make a person "it."

At La Chola.

At TransGriot.

At Questioning Transphobia.

At Shakesville.

At Feministe.

(Violence against women and its portrayal in the media is one of my major topics of study, and I'll be all over this soon, I promise. Because violence against trans women is both violence against women and boundary policing, both abusing a victim that is easy to pick on, that society won't blame you for, and the media portrays it consistently like the trans person in question was asking for it. And fuck them.)

More on Transgender

Holly at Feministe, whose perspective on this issue is much closer than mine is, has a fabulous and heartbreaking post up about the NPR series I wrote about earlier.

Please go read it.

Transgendered kids, part 2

So I finally got around to listening to part 2 of NPR's series on transgendered kids today. And this one definitely made me cry.

See, Violet was born Armand.

Armand found a Minnie Mouse costume one day and fell in love with it. It had belonged to his older sister, Melina, but Armand wouldn't take it off.

Armand's parents didn't want to accept it. They tried to make him live as a boy. Their house was full of explosive, uncontrolled fights. Psychiatrists threw out alphabet-soup diagnoses. Then Armand threatened suicide, pointed a knife at himself, scared the hell out of his older sister.

It wasn't ADD or OCD or anything else that shrinks have easy drugs to fix. Depression meds didn't cure it. (And I don't want anyone to think I'm deriding them for taking those drugs, but I am damn sure that shrinks who met a transgendered kid and started throwing psych meds at her should be slapped.)

When Armand's parents finally found a psychiatrist who diagnosed their child with Gender Identity Disorder (a term I dislike, but one that helped them deal with it, at least), they described it as a feeling of relief, that someone finally understood. They immediately stopped trying to force Armand to live as a boy.

Her mother said, "We could see the desperation in her face...it was like she was screaming out 'Listen to me, this is who I am!'"

"When we found out she was transgender, it was like 'What do you need?'" As soon as they let her, age 10, be who she felt she was, she was the happiest kid in the world. It was like a different child. "She looked freer," her parents said.

Then the family found out about a treatment that postpones puberty. Hormone blockers are given once a month, and they stop the development of sex hormones. This prevents physical differences between genders from developing--no facial hair, no Adam's apple, no voice deepening. It makes later-life transgenderism easier, since the distinguishing characteristics are not there. The child can take hormones of the sex they feel that they are and be virtually indistinguishable from others.

The downside to this therapy is that if a child later takes hormones, they can become sterile. And of course there are those who say, as we discussed in the last post, that a child that young can't know whether he or she is actually transgender. But Armand's wonderful, loving, accepting father says he tells people, "What people fail to realize is that they made that decision long before [age 10]." He asks them how old they were when they knew they were a boy, or a girl.

And the therapy is designed to delay puberty, not to prevent it. It is designed to prevent the horrifying experience that Melina, Armand's sister, voiced so well:

Melina, who is 14, says she sometimes thinks about what it would be like if she woke up every day to a body that was slowing turning male. If she were growing in ways that felt alien and frightening.

"To go through the process of the gender that you're really not ... that must be the most scariest most disgusting thing ... I can't even imagine what that's like," she says.

Imagine, indeed.

NPR also spoke to Polly Carmichael, a British psychologist who works at the Portman Clinic in London and practices techniques apparently similar to Zucker's in that they require children to live as the gender they were born as. They claim that 80% of the children they work with grow up and remain their biological gender.

However, the Amsterdam clinic where the hormone blocker therapy was instituted says that 100% of their patients grow up and live as transgender.

I understand being leery of hormone therapies. I could tell you all about how Depo-Provera screwed my life right up for a couple of years. I don't know how I'd feel about my child undergoing hormone therapy. But I do know that I can vividly picture the feeling of my body turning into something alien, different, and that it would feel monstrous. (Oh, the monsters-post I'm going to write soon...)

The fears of all those people who say that a child's gender identity is fluid (which should be more proof that gender is not biologically predetermined, shouldn't it?) and thus the child might want to "change back" would have more weight if these parents were actually putting their kids through sex reassignment surgery, which is not the same thing as being transgender or taking hormones. But otherwise, why not? Who cares if Armand only wants to be Violet for a few years and then decides that Armand was a better fit, after all?

Robert, Violet's father, said that telling his family was the hardest part. After all, Violet was ten. He told the story of a family gathering where all of his aunts were sitting together, and one of them, the matriarch of the family, asked him "Robert, didn't you have a boy?"

And he steeled himself, and he explained that Armand was now Violet, that she was transgender, and he brought her over to say hello to her great-aunts.

And when she happily skipped away, he waited for the aunts' response.

"I'm proud of you," his aunt said. "It must have been hard."

(Rewriting this again made me well up with tears again.)

(Cross-posted at Season of the Bitch)