TESC locker rooms and trans access

Word is, the locker rooms at the Evergreen State College (TESC) are the setting of a threatened lawsuit against the school.

Colleen Francis, a 45 year-old transgender woman and student at TESC, is at the center of a controversy over her use of the TESC women's locker room. As portrayed in several media outlets, the story goes like this: the locker rooms are also used by local high school swim teams, and some parents of high school swimmers have complained that Francis' use of the locker rooms causes their daughters to be "uncomfortable" and "a bit shocked" because Francis has "male genitalia." The parents have sent their demands to the school through an attorney, Jeremy Tedesco. An Arizona-based 'religious-liberties' group, Alliance Defending Freedom, also sent a letter to TESC urging the college to ban trans-women from the women's locker room.

Here are links to some of the coverage of this story. (Be advised: the MyNorthwest.com link includes audio from a radio interview between KIRO-radio Dori Monson and parents' attorney Jeremy Todesco. Monson turns out to be a bigot par excellance, going so far as to casually endorse violence against trans-women.)

Daily Mail
KIRO TV (includes video interview with Ms. Francis [in which she makes a tactless equivalence between trans-oppression and Jim Crow laws])
MyNorthwest.com (includes KIRO-radio interview with Mr. Todesco)
ABC
Seattle Weekly

Now I'd like to pose a few thoughts.

1) Monson and Todesco speak about Francis "exposing" herself to "young girls." This conjurs an image of someone in a trenchcoat leaping out at prepubescent children and waving their naught bits around. But we can safely assume that that's not what occurred, because if it had, the police would have been called and there'd be no controversy. Rather, it appears that a transgender woman just tried to use the locker room to change her clothes like any other woman. This is Monson and Todesco's "exposure."

I just want to highlight how it's not what Francis has done (use the locker room to change), but rather what Francis is (trans), that appears to be motivating Todesco et al's hostility. Notice too that Todesco et al don't offer any alternatives: they don't seem to care whether TESC forces Francis to use the men's locker room or bans trans people in general. They're totally unconcerned by the way they're further marginalizing an already-oppressed group.

Plus, isn't it weird that a trans-woman is presumed to be a sex threat, but cis-acting people are not? Can we just take a moment to reflect on the cognitive dissonance required to be a) deeply upset over Francis' presence in the women's locker room yet b) completely unconcerned with all the other  naked children/naked adults? Again, it's not Francis' actions that are the target; it's her existence.

2) It's clear from their comments that Todesco et al simply don't take the existence of trans people seriously. For them, this is a simple case of a male sex predator using over-reaching non-discrimination laws to get at young girls. I think that this is important to notice: Todesco et al don't see themselves as being transphobic or hateful, but rather as the decent, sane defenders of children's safety. This is how privilege and oppression work: the privileged don't consciously hate or oppose the oppressed so much as they fail to even see them in the first place. The problem with Todesco et al is not that they are evil, but that their model of how to be good doesn't have room for people like Francis. (This also explains how they can be so oblivious to the possibility that one of the high schoolers in question is trans or otherwise queer, and how they don't notice what they're teaching their children about how to treat marginalized groups.)

3) Props to TESC and WA legislators for standing up for basic civil rights for trans people. That said, let's note that having gender segregated locker rooms is a (literally) concrete endorsement of gender segregation and gender conventions. Who gets hurt by gender segregation? People who don't fit into presumed gender categories, i.e. transgender people. It seems to me that TESC is taking a middle-ground between two coherent positions: on the one hand, you can join Todesco et al and coherently endorse and enforce old fashioned gender conventions. In that case, transgender people aren't real, and Francis is relegated to the men's locker room. On the other hand, you can endorse progressive (i.e. non-heteronormative and non-cis-normative) views of human nature, in which case it doesn't make sense to have gender-discriminated locker rooms in the first place. So if TESC wants to adopt a position of recognizing trans people and treating them with justice and decency AND remain coherent, then it needs to abolish male vs. female locker rooms in general. (But obviously this radical step is implausible for a state-sponsored institution, so I laud them for doing what they can.)

4) How is it okay to casually put someone's genitals up for national debate? I know this makes me sound old-fashioned and cranky, but seriously: How is this acceptable? How can we possibly be this un-self-conscious in our policing of gender? Why are we having a debate about what counts as a "real" woman, instead of observing a dispute between two parties over what's appropriate locker-room behavior?

Side note: this is a great example of privilege/oppression in action. The oppressed have to justify themselves; the the burden of proof is on them. The privileged don't have to justify anything; their position is just 'common sense.' This really comes through in the Todesco/Monson interview: try to count how many times they use phrases like "It's just preposterous," "Outrageous," "Ridiculous," etc. Then try to count how many times they say anything, anything which could be taken for empathy or even curiosity regarding Francis' welfare.

5) Speaking of hypocritical indecency and the Dori Monson show, why doesn't casually endorsing violence/killing against a trans-woman provoke outrage (on the level of, say, a trans woman using the women's locker room)? In the KIRO-radio interview (linked above), Monson says, "I know what my instinct would be, if I found out that some guy was exposing himself to my daughters or to the girls that I coach. I know what my instincts would be, and my instincts would probably land me in jail." While almost everything Monson says in the interview amounts to an implicit endorsement of violence against trans people (since his whole position is that they're not really trans; they're just cis people using trans-identity as a strategy for sex predation), this is an all but explicit endorsement of violence. Considering the extraordinary levels of violence faced by trans people (see here and here), that's, well, awful. Shitty and bigoted and deeply fucked up and concretely harmful. (Again: not purposefully awful, because Monson sees his anger as righteous and defensive. Privilege is invisible to the privileged.)

6) Todesco's phrase "non-discrimination gone wild" pretty well shows what he thinks of social justice and equal access. Anyone who looks at justice in terms of "Give 'em an inch, and they'll demand a mile" is not offering a robust ethical position.

7) "Religious liberties" are part of the classical-liberal value of self-determination (as exemplified in O.W. Holmes' quote, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins"). Using them to control other people (e.g. here by the reactionary Alliance Defending Freedom, and e.g. the Catholic clergy's attack on Obamacare) is either confused or dishonest.

8) Can we, as a nation, decide to stop taking seriously people who bleat "What about the CHILDREN!!!" as an un-critical moralistic bludgeon? Can we please demand that people who purport to speak for children's welfare a) are acquainted with the needs and choices of said children, and b) offer some coherent criticism and alternative, rather than just a demand for the bad thing to stop? Can we make this a rule?

Addressing Privilege: "Acknowledge the distress while continuing to point out the difference in scale"

In this excellent, excellent piece on addressing privilege, Doug Muder goes beyond "Fuck privilege" to discuss how to effectively engage gatekeepers. His piece is itself a commentary on this (marginally less excellent) piece by Owldolatrous, which is a response to the recent kaffufle over the head of Chick-Fil-A's homophobic comments. Reading Muder's post, I felt like someone had clearly articulated something I've been trying to say for a long time.

The Gayness of Batman: a Brief History

"Gayness is built into Batman. ... Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay."

As we reported last week, this was the claim made by Batman, Incorporated writer Grant Morrison in an interview with Playboy where he offers his insights into the psychology of superheroes. In Morrison's view, Batman's attachment to Alfred and Robin and his alleged detachment from the women in "fetish clothes" who "jump around rooftops to get to him" is symptomatic of his conceptual gayness. That's a very selective framing, but as Morrison told the LA Times in 2010, "Batman can take anything. You can do comedy Batman, you can do gay Batman."

That's not true, of course. You can do comedy Batman, and you can do The Midnighter (Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's openly gay Batman analogue), but DC Comics is unlikely to allow any writer to make Batman gay, even in an Elseworlds or alternate-universe story. As Morrison himself says, Batman is intended to be heterosexual. And yet there is a gayness to Batman, and it has been part of his identity since his earliest days.

Read More: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/04/30/the-gayness-of-batman-a-brief-history-opinion-morrison/#ixzz1uhlOmSG8

Romney the queer-basher

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was a queer-basher in high school.

According to the Washington Post, five witnesses have independently confirmed that in 1965,  Romney led a "posse" of prep-school peers to physically assault a fellow student, "...like a pack of dogs." 

The target: "John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, (who) was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality." Romney was reportedly incensed at Lauber's long, bleached haircut, saying, "He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!" a classmate recalled. As the Post puts it:

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. (My emphasis.)

This all occurred at the Hogwarts-esque Cranbrook Schools, a private boarding school in Michigan. Romney was sent there by his automotive-mogul-turned-governor father, George W. Romney.

Another former Cranbrook student, Gary Hummel, who was gay and closeted at the time, recalled that Romney would call "Atta girl!" when Hummel attempted to speak in class. (The Post notes that similar homophobic bullying was common among Cranbrook's students and staff at the time.) Former students say Romney also enjoyed screwing with a near-blind teacher nicknamed "The Bat," e.g. walking him into closed doors.

How did Romney respond to these allegations, which surfaced early this morning?

Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul:

...anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body. The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.

And Romney himself: 

Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that...I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.

And Romney responding specifically to the Lauber accusation:

I don’t remember that incident. I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.

So, to summarize Romney's response:

1-The allegations exaggerate what happened.

2-Romney has no memory of what happened.

3-Romney apologizes for whatever might have happened, if it happened. "Obviously."

And the fourth part of this response comes from Romney supporters, who keep saying, "But he's such a nice guy!" The NYT reports,

Some friends and associates of Mr. Romney, including several who are gay, said they had a hard time reconciling the seemingly insensitive younger man with the tolerant, considerate one they have known as an adult.

This is one of the best non-apologies I've heard in a long time. (Way slipperier than shooter George Zimmerman's non-apology to Travon Martin's parents for killing their son, which Shakesville takes apart here.) Romney manages to not only simultaneously deny-and-not-deny the allegations, but also simultaneously apologize-and-not-apologize for non-specific events which may or may not have occurred. Take another look (with my emphasis added):

Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that.

In this first section of his non-apology, Romney lumps every "dumb" thing he ever did during high school, and then issues an all-sweeping apology to anyone who was ever "hurt or offended" by such dumb things. It's a rhetorically brilliant sentence: in addition to lumping queer-bashing and prank phone calls together into the same "hijinks"-type category, this statement has the same content as, "I apologize for anything that merits apology."

Moving along:

..I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.

Notice that it's  unclear whether "I apologize" refers to "a lot of  hijinks and pranks," or only the ones that went "too far," or the fact that there were some which went "too far." Again, the rhetorical effect of this is to make it entirely unclear just what Romney's "apology" applies to. Which, of course, is precisely the point of a non-apology: to make a lot of noise which looks and sounds like an apology, without ever acknowledging or taking responsibility for any wrongdoing. The effect, as Orwell wrote, is to mask one's silence with the sound of one's voice, "like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

I can't make up my mind about which part of Romney's response has the most dark humour: his tortuous non-apology, or the bit where he laughs and says,

"I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case." (My emphasis.)

Note, first, the weirdness of Romney taking a forceful position ("I certainly") on his own beliefs about his own thoughts. Then, notice how he casts the "1960s" as a golden age which pre-dated homophobia. There's an awful lot packed into the clause "furthest thing from our minds back in the  1960s":

1-Homosexuality was unknown in the 60s.

2-Thus, homophobia was unknown in the 60s.

3-Thus, Romney could not have been homophobic in the 60s.

4-Therefore, logically, Romney could not have queer-bashed Lauber.

So, since homophobia didn't exist yet, Romney couldn't have been a homophobic bully, in this lost Eden of our forefathers.

Gay Rights, AIDS, and Public Health

 If you're a queer man then you know that the rise of the AIDS epidemic was the moment when we galvanized. If the Stonewall riot of 1969 was our Pearl Harbor, then AIDS was our 9/11. Gay man after gay man died, suddenly but slowly enough to suffer, their bodies literally falling apart one process at a time. If you don't know this and you're a man and you have sex with men, then go here immediately.

And we—or rather, our predecessors—reacted. Groups like ACT-UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis took to the streets and phones to agitate. Recall that this was during Reagan's White House—years of “gay plague” passed before the president said the word “AIDS” in public. The bloc of queer activism which endures to this day—which we have to thank for the recent end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the imminence of national gay marriage—was born of the fact that gay men had a choice: fight, or die. Take your rights, or die. Become recognized, respected, political--or die. 

Not that 2012, three decades after the initiation of AIDS, has seen the erasure of homophobia. The HIV epidemic persists—indeed, it may be on the rise among young gay men because of the effects of new medications on risk-perceptions. Three decades of survivors are still with us, still surviving. Plenty of Americans give money to have us imprisoned or killed en masse,  or—perhaps worse—forced back into the closet. Queer kids still get bullied to death. Queer adults (some groups more than others) still get beaten and raped and killed for who they are or what they're perceived to be. Presidential candidates make opposing our very existence talking points during stump speeches.

BUT! But. But things are better, by any reasonable estimation. Marriage and the military are just two concrete examples of a broader progress we've made. Explicit homophobia is more or less rude in mainstream society, like farting or smoking. Our position as a threatened sub-group has improved tremendously during my lifetime.

What hasn't improved is: poverty. In fact, as the Occupy Wallstreet movement emphasizes, the gap between rich and poor has continued to expand in the past thirty years, following a trend which has held for twice a long. The gap between the medical care the two groups receive has stretched correspondingly: rich heiresses receive plastic surgery on their reality TV shows while ERs around the country function as de facto clinics to hoards of the tired and hungry, charging loan-shark rates for their services. If the position of queer men has improved, that's because we're moving up the ladder of inequality. The country hasn't improved, so much as it's improvedfor us.

What I want to highlight is how this issue of poor-healthcare intersects the issue of gay men's ascent from criminalization to contempt to grudging acceptance. This intersection occurs in two ways. First, there's the practical fact that in a country with fair healthcare, AIDS wouldn't have been nearly as devastating for gay men or anyone else. If our healthcare were modelled aroundreasonable-need and long-term public welfare,  instead of stop-gap emergency care and profit, we wouldn't have needed to wait for years—until a white, hemophiliac child named Ryan White died from AIDS after receiving an infected blood transfusion—for our government and our country to do something about the epidemic. And if we'd had fair healthcare, it's a good bet that HIV wouldn't have been as widespread. In short: if America had had fair healthcare for everyone, then homophobic apathy wouldn't have literally killed thousands of gay men throughout the 80s.

So it’s awesome that we galvanized into a national movement to demand fair treatment and equal rights, in the face of this horrific epidemic and sickening complacency. Awesome, but insufficient. Even though our position has improved, the medical system which casually allowed thousands (by now, millions) to die, the medical system which openly values lives according to dollars and social status, is still in place. Question: if next year some new plague swept through, say, migrant worker populations, or the homeless, or the incarcerated, does it seem plausible that the rest of us might just let them die, until our friends and neighbours began to get infected? Homophobia has decreased since 1981, but America’s willingness to let the poor die is as strong as ever.

This is the second intersection between poverty-healthcare and gay men as a political entity. When we appeal to straight America for fair treatment, our argument is based in a larger view of justice, equality, and human decency. We don’t want to be treated as gays; we want to be treated as human beings. There is, properly speaking, no such thing as gay rights. There are only human rights, and the groups to whom human rights are denied. As a consequence, our movement, our political bloc, can only demand equal protections and dignity for queer people when we demand them for all people. Our movement is only legitimate insofar as it advocates for all people’s dignity.

That is why it is simply not good enough for us to move up the ladder of inequality. We must be committed to equality in general, for all, queer and otherwise, and especially for the poor. And that means fair healthcare.

Queering Palestinian Solidarity

This Thursday at Last Word at 6:00 pm
Here's the facebook event page


On Thursday March 15th, Queer Palestine Solidarity activists and allies will gather in response and challenge the use of Queer identity to cover up
human rights abuses against Palestinians. The right wing group 'Stand with Us' along with the Israeli Consulate for the West Coast is sponsoring a
tour of the Israeli LGBTQ community members aiming to exploit Queer struggle in order to further the occupation of Palestine. Speakers for
Stand With Us  include an Israeli settler and the former CEO of Ahava, whose factory is in the Occupied Territories.

This event is an attempt to Pinkwash the ongoing crimes and human rights
abuses against Palestinians. Pinkwashing attempts to put forth a
"gay-friendly" vision of Israel while obscuring the daily abuses against
the Palestinians and in no way supports Palestinian and Arab Queer
liberation.

Queering Palestine Solidarity will feature a critical discussion of
Pinkwashing from the personal perspective of historical queer resistance.
We will discuss, share, and educate ourselves and stand in solidarity with
Queer Palestinians.

For more information on Pinkwashing and Palestinian and Solidarity Queer
Organizations:
Palestinian Gay Women
http://www.aswatgroup.org/

Palestinian Queers for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions
http://www.pqbds.com/

Al Qaws (The Rainbow)
www.alqaws.org

Black Laundry
www.blacklaundry.org

http://www.queersolidaritywithpalestine.com

http://www.pqbds.org

http://alaswat.irg

This is an op-ed about pinkwashing that Sarah Schulman published in the New
York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html

This is a recent article by Jasbir Puar about pinkwashing:
http://thefeministwire.com/2012/01/the-golden-handcuffs-of-gay-rights-how-pinkwashing-distorts-both-lgbtiq-and-anti-occupation-activism/

This is a recent article by Katherine Franke responding to a pinkwashing
event that PFLAG hosted:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katherine-franke/pflag-israel-pinkwashing_b_1290935.html


This event is co-sponsored by Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and
Justice, Olympia Jewish Voice for Peace and TESC Divest!