Chris,
I saw some of myself in a few paragraphs of your I-quit post, and–without defending anything else, or hoping to diminish the post itself–I wanted to explain some stuff about my reaction to the whole Twisty transphobia thing. (Excuse me, the first Twisty transphobia thing: another comments thread at her blog took almost exactly the same turn on almost exactly the same subject matter with almost exactly the same people just several days ago through the present, last I heard.)
I’m going to try to keep this as free of rancor as possible. I hope you understand that I’m trying to explain because I like and respect you enough to bore the shit out of you over long-dead discussions of trivial things. I drafted and then deleted a furious post around the time of Twisty Transphobia Eruption One, and I’m glad I didn’t publish it.
People–at least, not me and not the people I was exchanging irate emails with–weren’t upset with Twisty because she’d taken a break from her blog over the preceding few days or because she had a laissez-faire attitude in general. It was more about the unchallenged idea that this was unexpected. I believe that Twisty had no warning, but it wasn’t startling to everyone. The people targeted by the vitriol were not surprised. The people who hung out with them all the time, the ones who were frequently labeled fellow travelers, weren’t surprised.
I knew who these assholes were, and I’d tracked their careers on The Margins and their sallies towards the less-batshit mainstream with some nausea for some time. They were familiar, one of them in particular. Their presence, more than any personal disagreement with Twisty, was why I stopped hanging out there. This could just be hindsight, but I think I noticed some of the same ooged-out undertones amongst other queers when IBTP came up. Over the course of a few months, it became hostile space with hostile people in it. What happened wasn’t unexpected. It was obvious and inevitable.
When I heard that an IBTP comments thread had erupted in Buffalo Bill comments, I knew exactly who was involved and exactly what was being said. I knew how it would play out, and which people would say which things. I could probably have made an educated guess about the topic that started the discussion–although in that case, I would have been wrong, because transphobia is always pertinent and interesting to these people. I had seen it happen virtually verbatim several times before, and will probably see it happen again many more times.
I knew these things because I spent a few years as the target of these assholes. In fact, I’m still within their sights, although I’d be guilty of the same idiocy if I claimed to be as vulnerable. I…get curious about people who hate me. I see what they write and I remember it without trying. I don’t know how normal that is and I don’t claim that it’s healthy, but a lot of other queers and transpeople seemed to react the same way. I’ve encountered the same frustration in response to what can only be the same insensitivity on my part, when other assholes have finished with preliminaries that only fooled me.
I think that’s why people got so pissed off. Yes, you didn’t know. Yes, maybe you couldn’t have been expected to know. No, it’s not because you were busy or tired or sick or offline.
Anyhow. Like I said, old news for everyone but them. But I’ve been annoyed for a little while now, and I wanted to clarify.
So you weren’t upset with Twisty but rather with the atmosphere at IBTP, which is not exactly welcoming to transpeople?
I blame the patriarchy for transphobia.
As far as you’re concerned, I’m just gonna go with, “Never mind.”
‘Kay.
Oh, you’re not reading them right, Piny. They don’t hate transfolk, we just don’t exist.
Sarcastic, me? Perish the thought.
I liked Chris’ post, and I took the reference to the transphobic restroom IBTP thread as a slam on those calling for Twisty’s head after the incident, not to your rather more thoughtful post here on the subject (assuming I’m remembering the right thing).
Oddly enough, I actually think Chris’ post is pretty apropos of some of the discussion that goes on in Twisty’ comment threads; I, too, watched the transphobia issue blow up again a little while back, and in that thread as in many others over there, the groupthink gets a little frightening.
I think it’s true that real progressivism looks to draw connections between political issues and forms of oppression, and I think that a few people who find space at IBTP are very much in favor of viewing problems in isolation. Maybe I’m guilty of concern trolling here, but it’s a very small progressive tent that excludes transpeople and seems to view many other LGBT concerns as distractions at best. (Also: This may be the word-too-far that gets me clobbered, but there’s something ironic about a community that purports to advocate the abolition of gender while using all the synonyms of “male” as slurs – often directed at women who don’t tow the party line on, for example, trans issues.)
She lost me over the Great Blowjob Wars, which if memory serves came before the First Transphobia Outbreak. I was foolish enough to click over there during the FTO, but I learned my lesson and managed to avoid the temptation during the Second Transphobia Outbreak. Essentialist and essentially ugly. People say she’s a brilliant writer as though that gives her some sort of pass. I acknowledge the first but refuse to grant the second.
mhm.
And, yes. That’s really been the bottom line for me, well one of them. Funny, you wouldn’t think, right? TF’s a lesbian, Heart’s a “political lesbian,” as are a whole shitload of that bunch (a bunch more are straight, though, separatists too, surprise), o sure they say hateful ignorant shit about transfolk and this or that alternative sexual practice, but c’mon, they’re on -your- side! How could they possibly be creating a homophobic atmosphere? If anything, they have a problem with HETEROSEXUALITY…
and, no, sorry, that’s not correct, as far as I’m concerned at least.
One doesn’t have to be on one’s knees before a male oppressor or even actively heterosexual to be thoroughly, annoyingly heteronormative. Some of us don’t -want- to rabbit on endlessly about the War Between the Sexes, because it’s like…’k, you’re from Venus, they’re from Mars, I…don’t speak your crazy moon language, either of you, so -let’s call the whole thing off.-
But that by itself wouldn’t have been enough to earn my rancor; i would’ve just drifted off.
No; it’s…well, you look at the latest shitstorm wrt transfolk, okay, i mean the last umpteen hundred comments or so, and you tell me. Suddenly, “radicals” are sounding eerily like…Focus on the Family. “Sexual organs are for reproduction.” “men are men and women are women (and okay maybe intersex are intersex mumble quick let’s move on, but) -and that can never, ever change.-”
Or, in a separate, but related case not very far away, a conventionally straight woman gloating over the errant dismissal of a woman (by yet another of this type, apparently) who was volunteering for a DV crisis centre, because she’s a stripper and porn performer and -it might frighten the horses I mean women.-
Rationalizations for the rankest bigotry, spin that would make Bill O’Reilly dizzy, approving links to the Daily Telegraph and people who use data from the Heritage Center, slut-shaming, arguing against gay marriage (albeit supposedly for “feminist” reasons), gender policing, sexuality policing, invoking the law to go after kinky folk, but most of all,
-straight women and even men running rampant, telling queer folk and sexual “deviants” that they’re Bad or at least hopelessly confused, poor dears-, and THAT ISN’T EVEN QUESTIONED while all this other shit goes on…
…yeah. That just feels a little too familiar. And -not- in a good way.
So, I quit too. Whatever that is, I quit. I refuse to call it feminism, or at least THE feminism. I keep going through periods of -trying- to “live and let live.- But this just isn’t working out. At all. Because -they- aren’t doing that.
You know, off topic, but I really don’t understand the whole ‘political lesbian’ thing. If I were a lesbian that would feel so co-opting to me.
You can’t be a ‘political black person.’ Although I guess I’ve seen people try.
Bleh.
Ya know… you’re being tooooo kind, Piny. I had already decided that TF was a dishonest hypocrite months before Transplozion One erupted. So, no… the shit-stirring bullshit was not in the slightest bit a surprise. The refusal to be held accountable for anything having to do with her own blog? Not shocking. That’s how she operates. Racism? Classism? Transhate? And, yes, sexism? Totally par for the course at IBTP. And, the woman knows it.
So, that last gargantuan pile-on?
The “Tee hee, now, ladies, let’s NOT have this become a flaming clusterfuck of transphobia!” bit there at the end of that entry? (Not that I care about my comments, remember?”)”
She’s disgusting. And, I’m disgusted with the people that don’t pick up on it–because it’s just exactly that obvious. She really doesn’t give a shit about the trans issue. When push comes to shove, she’s done absolutely nothing to indicate that she gives a flying fuck about it, in any way, shape, or form. All she’s done is provide a venue for the Usual Suspects to spew venom.
So, yes… the WS/Margins folks are what they are. But, they’re transparent about it. Twisty, on the other hand, is full of shit. “Oh, no, guys… don’t do that. I’m not gonna stop you, hee, hee, and I don’t really care about it, hee hee, but… yeah… don’t do that.”
*shrug* Nothing’s completely equivalent. I don’t believe in essentialism either. And yeah: some of the people who ID as “political lesbian” might just be expressing love/desire for women/a woman & feel that the political movement gave them the freedom to do so, and that it is, indeed, a political act to…well essentially come out, except we may not be using that language, but fine whatever.
and yeah, some peoples’ orientations are more fluid than others. Some peoples’ desires -do- change over a lifetime. Some people…dammit, desire is complicated, and so is love. So is sexuality.
What bothers ME is, most of the “political lesbians” I’ve seen don’t talk about any of those things hardly at all. Even if they’re not the “simply abstaining from men, no sex with women please” kind (THAT definition -does- bug me; if you’re celibate, or asexual, just frigging say it!). “Desire” seems to be something that is bent to one’s -will-, to fit the ideology. And that…no. Just…no. That’s -wayyyy- too familiar. So what if in this case it matches the desires I already happen to have (why can’t every woman be just like meeeee?) I remember very well how misery-making it is to try to tame one’s unruly desires, one’s sexuality, to cram all that into someone else’s Procrustean bed; why would I want to turn around and do it to anyone else? Revenge is all I can think of, but that particular game doesn’t interest me. No.
Vanessa, I completely feel what you’re saying. Political lesbianism pisses me off more than I can articulate, so thank you for doing it for me!
more to the point (she said, following up a post still in moderation), if you’re gonna flip definitions around to mean whatever you want them to mean–lesbian, forfuckssake “colonization” (!), then it’s pretty fucking rank to get pissy at someone ELSE using words in ways that aren’t exactly the way -you- mean them. To wit: feminist. Gender. Woman.
shrug. it reminds me of fundamentalist Christians, it really does. the ex-gay thing, and the “dogma over people” thing, and the “love the sinner not the sin” thing, and the “we’re the REAL victims, by which we mean you won’t let us control everything” thing…
and, oh yeah, “sexual organs are for reproduction.” Why, that didn’t even hardly need any adjustment at all, did it?
btw, this post over at Cassandra Says feels kind of related.
[...] iq Ramadan Piny: With great traffic, etc. A bit more on blogwars Zuzu: Break Time Piny: Just a quick note. A response to Chris Clarke, and transphobia in the blogosphere.
[...]
Ultimately, I think that the kind of radfems who dominate much of the IBTP discussion are deeply threatened by transfolk, because they give lie to the perfect “class women” analysis. If the idea of women isn’t sharply defined, then neither is class women, and the cornerstone begins to crumble.
Nevermind that the dissolution of the concept of binary gender that queerness tends to refute could actually be the proverbial Twistolution. (God, I hate that term.)
The Second Transphobia Eruption seemed to me to be of a different quality to the first. I didn’t participate in the first at all, but I was around for the first 200 or so comments on the second (some time after which, I gather, it became properly nasty. I haven’t looked, but I’ve seen Twisty’s follow-up post). This time around, at least in the early stages I saw, there seemed to be a lot more people, including me, fighting against the transphobic contingent.
I don’t say this to pretend that everything’s OK, because it isn’t. There’s definitely a subset of radical feminists who have a serious blindspot about trans issues and, as evil fizz points out, are intensely threatened by transpeople and further by the notion that binary sex might not exist. Their feminism is a fragile arrangement resting on exactly the same biological reductionism that they claim to be fighting. They rigorously police the doors of the club called Women, and see transwomen as attempting to muscle in (transmen, as far as they’re concerned, seem not to exist, because they don’t fit into this vision).
However, that is emphatically not true of everyone at IBTP, nor of all radical feminists. It doesn’t seem to be Twisty’s opinion either, though I haven’t seen her approach the subject head-on.
IBTP may still be a hostile space for many people, and not just men. Despite the stated fact that Twisty is queer, there were recently posts from some of the lesbian commenters saying they felt the other comments were heteronormative. There has been racism as well as transphobia recently. None of this is OK. But I don’t believe it’s the majority opinion at IBTP, and in my own experience Twisty acts quickly and decisively when her attention is drawn to a problem commenter.
Perhaps it’s a weak defence, but I do love Twisty’s writing, and I prefer to judge her on that rather than on the storm she provokes. If you run a blog, it is your responsibility to delete and bar any actual hate speech, threats, libel etc, but it is your choice how much debate you allow short of that. I’m not going to defend every decision she has made on which comments stay and which go, but equally I’m not going to hold the opinions of some of her commenters against her.
Piny, thank you for this.
I will note that I wasn’t thinking solely of the IBTP commenter issue: it was the third whiny “why is my comment stuck in moderation” email from the same commenter that prompted the inclusion of that section.
But that episode definitely came to mind while I was writing, and though at the time I already thought your contributions to the discussion consistently humane and thoughtful, I appreciate the further explication of your experience there. Enlightening and saddening.
Yes, I saw that more people were fighting the good fight in that second thread, and I for one appreciated some of your contributions there, CM.
that said, though:
well, here’s the other gist of my previous carping against IBTP:
okay, on the one hand, y’all are cutting her slack because -you enjoy her writing.-
otoh, every other damn topic in there is about well have you EXAMINED why you like such and so, you may LIKE it, but you’re ENABLING THE PATRIARCHY and HURTING WOMEN, just so you know.
but, i notice, a lot of her own as well as the regulars’ sometimes more obscure pleasures go cheerfully unexamined.
it grates.
i mean, yes, she writes well, and i’m not saying everyone who reads her gets off on the fact that she rips apart people and things that they don’t like, you know, it’s okay because it’s the Patriarchy which means “things and people what are safe to criticize because they have power while we have none;”
it’s just, y’know, that IS a pleasure; and then when people, usually women, who go “well actually that kind of hurts me too” or even “I don’t agree” speak up, they get savaged.
but, that doesn’t count. it’s just, what, harmless fun? as opposed to o i don’t know, putting on makeup or dancing around a pole.
whatever, i sang this song way too many times. and i can ignore that aspect of it when it really is shit like lipstick and blowjobs i expect.
but, as we see here, it really isn’t -just- that, is it.
…i mean, look, doesn’t it strike anyone else as odd that someone is talking about “revolution,” even funny-like, when in fact it all seems like just some elaborate game? is anything actually HAPPENING, Reg? and if so–what?
whatever happened to “be the change you seek?”
…I mean, look, okay, comparisons of this sort usually aren’t that useful, but say you have someone talking about o I don’t know, Class Revolution, you know, yer classic Marxism, or something along those lines; but whenever anyone brings up o say what’s happening to Roe v. Wade, a bunch of regulars come out of the woodwork and say all sorts of appalling, sexist shit about whiny women ruining the Movement with these trifling concerns or worse, (yeah, this wouldn’t happen as such but go with me for a sec) that they support the overturning of Roe because some really elaborate and increasingly headdesky rationalization of what essentially boils down to “women need to procreate to support our glorious Revolution.”
also lots of incredibly awful shit like–well, the misogynist shit we see all the time, the shit that IBTP was set up to (basically) complain about. like, MRA level hatefulness (because that’s what that trans-bashing is, point of fact).
and whenever anyone complains to/about the (male) host, at best he goes, something cryptic like,
“After the Revolution there will be no labor division between the sexes.”
…okay…but, -right now,- women are hurting, in concrete ways which could be remedied with concrete actions, and even more “right now,” some people are being GIANT HATEFUL ASSHOLES to the women on your site, effectively silencing them and driving them away and reinforcing the misogynist attitudes reflected in the mainstream, does this bother you at all?…
“I SAID I don’t agree with it. Y’all cut that sexism out, now.” (later) “Look, I never signed up to be a party host, the hell with you all, I can’t be bothered with your little infighting. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want.”
iow, pretty much what Kos said, that time, sort of.
which, okay fine: it’s your house, you can do what you want:
but your inaction does in fact count as an action. And, if you put yourself in any sort of “leadership” position–and, no, if yer not actually doing real world activism (a la Kos) it’s not quite the same degree of egregious, -perhaps-, but see the thing is when you talk about “Revolution” that might actually -mean- some things to some people; and your blog is maybe one of the first pulled up when people google your passion,
which, in this case, abandoning the analogy, would be “feminism,”
well?
and btw, the fact that people stopped short of “Buffalo Bill” this time doesn’t mean there was only a -difference of opinion- going on.
To me, it’s the equivalent of Focus on the Family explaining their position on homosexuality, okay. Or, yep, even David Duke and POC, or immigration.
So, sooner or later, they learn to talk nicer. No more outright slurs. Lots more elaborate rationalizations for -why- so sorry, we can’t allow same sex marriage, or gay people to belong to our organization, or why we really favor effective re-segregation. It’s nothing -personal.- We don’t -hate.- This is just what we -believe.-
(and all the while, the undercurrent: pervert pervert f-lover n-lover you’re ruining it for everyone get out get out)
No.
If you want to allow that, then that’s fine; but that’s what that is.
And, I haven’t really been around the other threads in a while, but I seem to remember MRA’s and such getting the disemvowelling treatment.
because, I really don’t think it’d ever be just a matter of -opinion- -there,- if someone said, o, i don’t know, elaborate defense of this or that rapist. or why “domestic violence” is a crock and men are the real victims here.
just sayin’.