It was with mixed emotions that I watched the video of trans supermodel Lea T on Oprah last week. What was most positive is that she is able to be an openly trans model and make her way in her chosen career without the discrimination from which most other trans people suffer at work. She will hopefully be an example to young trans people all over the world that there are other people like them, they are not the only one and they can change their lives. They will not always have to live in fear.
But what made me, and indeed many other trans people around the world feel uncomfortable, was how she appeared, prompted by Oprah Winfrey, to define being transgender as a ‘pathology’. This is something many trans people are currently fighting against and passionately disagree with. Indeed it is something trans people of all types around the world increasingly agree about, there is now an increasingly vocal worldwide campaign to stop trans pathologization.
The problem is that, when someone like Lea T becomes famous, she is suddenly everywhere in the media and her view of herself, that she is suffering from some kind of illness, is likely to become widespread amongst the millions of people who have never knowingly met a trans person.
Yet is it important to recognise where her view of herself comes from. Like most trans people she has probably grown up in a world in which she has been told, or has felt, from a very young age, that her perceptions of herself as female rather than male, are abnormal, and constitute a problem. From the video it would appear that she influenced by the, now outdated psychiatric definition Gender Identity Disorder, a diagnosis which is often required to obtain the kind of surgery she needs to align her body with her own gender identity.
Yet the idea that trans people are mentally ill is increasingly being challenged. It is important to remember that homosexuality was considered a mental illness by the psychiatric profession until the 1980s. Now, only the fruitcake far right think it is.
Joan Roughgarden, professor of Biology at Stanford University has shown that transgender behaviour and physical manifestation in common in nature, identifying huge numbers of species which change sex and species in which cross-gender behaviour is common. In fact, it may well turn out that, once most animal species have been investigated for their social interactions that the heterosexual, cisgender, nuclear family made up of an alpha male and a coy but choosy female which is culturally dominant in human society is very much in a minority in nature.
The main sources of the problem of transgender pathologization are social and cultural. As Prof. Milton Diamond so concisely put it; “Nature loves diversity, society hates it.” There is a tendency for society to blame the individual when they don’t fit in when it is actually society, which needs to change to accommodate the range of individual diversity. The problem in Western society has been the over dominance of materialism. You are considered to be a woman if you have a vagina and a man if you have a penis. Other, less materially-obsessed societies have been able to recognise that a person’s gender is more to do with their spirit than with the material manifestation of their body.
Given the diversity of gender expression, even just among cisgender people from different societies around the world, it becomes clear that in essence gender is simply a culture (usually with an accompanying caste system) taught from a very young age to the extent that it appears to be natural. Yet it is no more natural for girls to like pink and boys to like blue than it is for the English to like cricket and Americans to like baseball. We have to come to understand that there is a greater diversity amongst the human race than our narrow view of gender would have us believe, and that the culturally-imposed gender norms of male and female based solely on material criteria have never been adequate.
As such the fact that Lea T feels that there is something mentally wrong with her is understandable. She has been brought up to believe that there are only two immutable genders. She appears to have taken to heart the view of society that it is she who is the problem not the cultural system which has brought her up to believe she is wrong. This needs to change.
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Monday, 21 February 2011
David Cameron: A liar, a cheat and a threat to democracy
Just over a year ago I blogged about how David Cameron was “the most dishonest politician”. I did not realise my words would be so graphically illustrated in the form of Cameron’s policy directive in the Daily Torygraph today. His latest decree is that all services should be privatised unless they are the armed forces or the security services. Like his policy on the NHS, this was not in the Tory Manifesto.
Why is this? The only answer can possibly be that David Cameron is a liar. He really is the most dishonest politician. The complete privatisation of all state functions is a huge and fundamental policy for any government to impose. The fact that it was not in the Tory Manifesto means that Cameron is effectively unconcerned with democracy as we know it. He is prepared to implement a change to which the majority of the public are opposed. If he is so confident that this policy is the right one, why did he not tell us that this was his policy before the election?
The answer is, of course, that he would never have been “elected” if he had done so. David Cameron is a dictator; cheat, a liar and a threat to democracy and the fabric of British society. It is the responsibility of the British people to remove him. Like we did in 1944.
Why is this? The only answer can possibly be that David Cameron is a liar. He really is the most dishonest politician. The complete privatisation of all state functions is a huge and fundamental policy for any government to impose. The fact that it was not in the Tory Manifesto means that Cameron is effectively unconcerned with democracy as we know it. He is prepared to implement a change to which the majority of the public are opposed. If he is so confident that this policy is the right one, why did he not tell us that this was his policy before the election?
The answer is, of course, that he would never have been “elected” if he had done so. David Cameron is a dictator; cheat, a liar and a threat to democracy and the fabric of British society. It is the responsibility of the British people to remove him. Like we did in 1944.
Saturday, 19 February 2011
Man United v Crawley Town every week: or the big corporations v the taxpayer
#ukuncut
Those who oppose the UKuncut actions against Barclays and other corporate targets really have misunderstood the situation quite badly. Some have even proposed that the protest should be targeted at the Tax offices which appear to be unable to enforce payment of tax by these corporations.
Yet there is a REASON why the tax offices are under-resourced and unable to make these companies pay their faor share of tax. These companies use their considerable wealth to obtain political influence, especially with the Conservative Party. The donations they make (probably out of the billions they save from not paying tax) ensure that these offices are always unable to make large multinationals pay their fair share of tax. They ensure that the wages paid to staff there are considerably less than the wages available to corporate tax accountants who ensure that these corporations avoid the tax, thus ensuring that the best accountants are on the side of the companies. It is a bit like Manchester United playing Crawley Town every week.
These corporate donations also buy politicians’ inaction on closing the loopholes that enable their accountants to hide their profits in places like the Cayman Islands. Or indeed they buy politicians’ action on creating such loopholes.
So it is rather like Man Utd Playing Crawley Town every week but also supplying the ref, the linesmen and on a pitch which is sloping towards the Crawley Town goal and having their goal on wheels and a zip-wire so that it can be moved backwards and forwards very quickly along the goal-line.
This is what those who argue against the targetting of the banks by UKuncut have forgotten. The people involved in chasing these corporations are mostly players from the Vauxhall Conference and the people working for the companies are the Wayne Rooneys. These companies have huge political influence, most of it behind the scenes, which allows them to distort the tax regime and means of collection in their favour.
As such the people mostv responsible for creating corporate tax regimes which favour large corporations like Barclays, are the very multibillion pound congliomerates which benefit from the lax tax regime and the loopholes they provide.
Understanding this is crucial to understanding the way the new politico-business establishment functions in modern society.
Those who oppose the UKuncut actions against Barclays and other corporate targets really have misunderstood the situation quite badly. Some have even proposed that the protest should be targeted at the Tax offices which appear to be unable to enforce payment of tax by these corporations.
Yet there is a REASON why the tax offices are under-resourced and unable to make these companies pay their faor share of tax. These companies use their considerable wealth to obtain political influence, especially with the Conservative Party. The donations they make (probably out of the billions they save from not paying tax) ensure that these offices are always unable to make large multinationals pay their fair share of tax. They ensure that the wages paid to staff there are considerably less than the wages available to corporate tax accountants who ensure that these corporations avoid the tax, thus ensuring that the best accountants are on the side of the companies. It is a bit like Manchester United playing Crawley Town every week.
These corporate donations also buy politicians’ inaction on closing the loopholes that enable their accountants to hide their profits in places like the Cayman Islands. Or indeed they buy politicians’ action on creating such loopholes.
So it is rather like Man Utd Playing Crawley Town every week but also supplying the ref, the linesmen and on a pitch which is sloping towards the Crawley Town goal and having their goal on wheels and a zip-wire so that it can be moved backwards and forwards very quickly along the goal-line.
This is what those who argue against the targetting of the banks by UKuncut have forgotten. The people involved in chasing these corporations are mostly players from the Vauxhall Conference and the people working for the companies are the Wayne Rooneys. These companies have huge political influence, most of it behind the scenes, which allows them to distort the tax regime and means of collection in their favour.
As such the people mostv responsible for creating corporate tax regimes which favour large corporations like Barclays, are the very multibillion pound congliomerates which benefit from the lax tax regime and the loopholes they provide.
Understanding this is crucial to understanding the way the new politico-business establishment functions in modern society.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Toby Young, idiocy and selling one's soul to the devil.
Just when I thought my opinion of that inane right-wing “journalist” Toby Young couldn’t sink any lower, he confounds me with possibly the most ridiculous “article” ever written in a UK Newspaper; ‘Why the Super-rich deserve their tax holiday’ which is garbage even in relation to the low standards of the Daily Mail. This really is nothing more than blatant propaganda for the bloated mega-rich. Dr Goebbels move over.
His main argument, that companies will move their operations elsewhere if they are charged high tax rates in the UK, is like a sieve with a large hole in the bottom. Vodafone is welcome to move its entire operation to Liechtenstein and dominate the mobile phone market there, but it would be the equivalent to dominating the mobile phone market of the small market town of East Dereham in Norfolk. I doubt they would make any profit at all, let alone the billions they make from mobile users in the UK, even if they did pay no tax.
The same is true of Arcadia, the compamy which owns Topshop and other fashion retail outlets. Philip Green is welcome to move every branch of Topshop, MIss Selfridge, Dotty Perks and Burton to Monaco where his company would pay no tax. But I doubt that he would make anything other than a bankruptcy-inducing loss.
Ditto Boots and many other companies.
The truth is that Vodafone, Topshop, Boots and others can only make their profits by trading in the UK, they are in every high street, they sell to the British people, that is how they make their money. To allow them to move their money to ‘offshore’ tax havens so that they avoid paying tax in the UK is simply allowing them to steal money owed to the British people in their tax. Toby Young cannot argue that, if tax rates are too high in the UK, they will go elsewhere. This will never happen. they can only make their money by trading in the UK.
For Toby Young to argue thay they “deserve” not to pay the same level of tax as the rest of us is stupid. These companies can only make money by trading the the UK market with its 60 million (and counting) consumers. They should be forced to pay tax here like everyone else.
If these companies paid their fair share of tax we wouldn’t need to cut
EMA,
Universities,
school buildings,
Sure Start,
classroom assistants,
benefits for the sick and disabled,
the NHS, the police,
etc, etc, etc.
I suspect that this is why the Tory-led government is permitting them to avoid paying tax in the UK, because they want to cut these things anyway…
His main argument, that companies will move their operations elsewhere if they are charged high tax rates in the UK, is like a sieve with a large hole in the bottom. Vodafone is welcome to move its entire operation to Liechtenstein and dominate the mobile phone market there, but it would be the equivalent to dominating the mobile phone market of the small market town of East Dereham in Norfolk. I doubt they would make any profit at all, let alone the billions they make from mobile users in the UK, even if they did pay no tax.
The same is true of Arcadia, the compamy which owns Topshop and other fashion retail outlets. Philip Green is welcome to move every branch of Topshop, MIss Selfridge, Dotty Perks and Burton to Monaco where his company would pay no tax. But I doubt that he would make anything other than a bankruptcy-inducing loss.
Ditto Boots and many other companies.
The truth is that Vodafone, Topshop, Boots and others can only make their profits by trading in the UK, they are in every high street, they sell to the British people, that is how they make their money. To allow them to move their money to ‘offshore’ tax havens so that they avoid paying tax in the UK is simply allowing them to steal money owed to the British people in their tax. Toby Young cannot argue that, if tax rates are too high in the UK, they will go elsewhere. This will never happen. they can only make their money by trading in the UK.
For Toby Young to argue thay they “deserve” not to pay the same level of tax as the rest of us is stupid. These companies can only make money by trading the the UK market with its 60 million (and counting) consumers. They should be forced to pay tax here like everyone else.
If these companies paid their fair share of tax we wouldn’t need to cut
EMA,
Universities,
school buildings,
Sure Start,
classroom assistants,
benefits for the sick and disabled,
the NHS, the police,
etc, etc, etc.
I suspect that this is why the Tory-led government is permitting them to avoid paying tax in the UK, because they want to cut these things anyway…
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Genocide in Honduras
Time to ask questions about the organisations complicit in exporting hate-crime and murder to the third world.
Honduras Nov 29 2010 - 18 Jan 2011
• Dania Roberta Sevilla Raudales (November 29, 2010. Beaten and burned to death age 58)
• Luisa Alex Alvarado Hernandez (December 22, 2010. Died from stoning and being set alight aged 23)
• Oscar Martínez Salgado (December 20, 2010. Stabbed and set on fire in her home aged 45)
• Reana Bustamante (December 29, 2010. Stabbed repeatedly)
• ‘Cheo’ ( January 2, 2011. Stabbed to death on a street in Tegucigalpa age unknown but from the picture I have seen she looks around 20)
• Génesis Briget Makaligton (January 7, 2011. Strangled)
• Fergie Alice Ferg (January 7, 2011 strangled age 25)
• Unknown transgender person (10 January 2011, no further details)
The seven names above are all transgender people. By the time you read this there may be more. They were all murdered in Honduras between the 29 Nov 2010 and 18 Jan 2010; seven murders in the space of just 48 days. They need to be added to the gruesome tally of at least 171 LGBT people murdered in Honduras in the lat five years. As things stand, a transgender person is being murdered in Honduras every week.
To put this is context, if trans people make up around 1% of the population, as current estimates suggest, this would be equivalent to 700 cisgender (non-transgender) people being murdered in less than two months. If people were being slaughtered at this rate anywhere in the world it would be in all the papers, but because the victims are transgender, and in a far-off third-world country we hear nothing. In fact, for a country with the population similar to that of London, there are vastly more trans people murdered there per head of population than anywhere else in the world. If a transgender person in London were being brutally murdered every week it would be world news.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has issued this statement condemning the killings. Despite the statement's cautious language it uses the word "impunity", strongly suggesting that this is happening with the connivance of the government of Honduras. If those who engage in hate-crime of this sort see that they can freely kill members a certain group of people in the knowledge that they will not be pursued, is there any wonder that transgender people in Honduras are being meticulously wiped out? Effectively the Honduran government is complicit in the deliberate and systematic extermination of its transgender citizens. But not just the government…
What is apparent from the list above is that these people have been murdered in a particularly frenzied, brutal and vicious way, stabbed multiple times, burned, beaten and stoned. The manner of their deaths, in particular the stoning, particularly barbaric crime, something normally used exclusively by religious maniacs, is probably the clue as to the source of this hatred. The excessive violence with which all these people have been murdered strongly suggests the influence of this kind of irrational hatred.
In fact, murders of transgender people in Honduras started to increase in October 2008, coinciding with an apparent increase in hate-speech apparently from the growing number of Christian evangelists and even the Catholic church, against transgender people as well as gays and lesbians, who are also being targeted.
It is time LGBT people and supporters of human rights around the world put pressure on the Honduran government to investigate these murders fully, to catch and punish the perpetrators and ensure that its transgender citizens can go about their lives without fear of a violent and horrific death. We also need public pressure on governments around the world to give refugee status to all LGBT people arriving from Honduras as a matter of course. Not only that, but Catholics and other Christians need to apply pressure on the Pope and leaders of evangelical churches to stop this incitement to genocide. These religious organisations cannot continue to operate in Honduras without significant financial help from people attending fundamentalist churches in Europe and North America whose donations are supporting these crimes.
Indeed these murders throw up the issue of the activities of fundamentalist Christian groups in third-world countries. The proposal to introduce the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda has been blamed by many on the influence of these organisations. It would seem that, given their inability to successfully incite the wide-scale murder of LGBT people in Western Europe and North America they have decided to pick on people even less able to defend themselves. The leaders of these groups raise money from unwitting churchgoers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to fund those encouraging this violence in the full knowledge of its consequences. Much as I would like to see these criminals posing as religious leaders brought to account for their crimes, I suspect the law is not capable of doing so. But public pressure can be applied to these religious extremists. Bullies prefer shadows; it is time to turn the full glare of the spotlight on them. Time for those who donate to fund “ministries” abroad to ask rather more probing questions about what their money is being used for.
Genocide is a strong word to use, but in the case of transgender people in Honduras I can find no other. It is clear to me that the government of Honduras and a number of supposedly Christian organizations have blood on their hands. And, unless those who contribute to the coffers of these groups start to take responsibility for finding out what is being done in their name and with their money, so will they.
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Police Violence - Targetting Women
As readers of UnCommon Sense will know, it is not uncommon for me to disagree with Julie Bindel. However on this occasion my slight disagreement with Julie is of a slightly different nature and probably not something she would disagree with herself. Julie, reporting from Parliament Square tweeted this and a few similar tweets;
"Support the students and hate the gov but a minority of nasty violent macho tossers down here, and not just the police for once".
Her take on the demo being that it was about macho twats on both sides of the police lines, intent on letting their testosterone take over. I can see her point, I haven't been to a demonstration yet where someone hasn't had testosterone problems, but I think it actually represents something rather more sinister than that; targetted violence against women.
OK so I have to admit that I arrived a bit late at the demo (because I couldn't get out of work that day), and my take on it as such may be a bit different. As I arrived, I noticed that the majority of people walking away from it with bloody heads were women and girls. This video, posted to show that the police officer fell off his horse rather than was dragged off it (as Cameron wanted us to think) actually shows, in the background, two women being beaten over the head by a policeman with a truncheon. These women were obviously not threatening anyone, yet they were targetted by a burly male police officer. This report from a girl from Barnsley clearly shows that police officers were engaged in deliberate targetting of women demonstrators, despite them being no threat to the officers involved in committing these crimes. The excellent reports from Laurie Penny have also shown how women and girls are deliberately targetted in unprovoked attacks;
"Fighting for breath, I am shoved roughly through the line by two police officers; twisting my neck, I see a young woman in a white bobble hat pinned between the shields and the crowd, screaming as the batons come down on her head once, twice, and her spectacles are wrenched from her face" (New Statesman 10 Dec 2010).
In the previous demonstration it is clear that Tahameena Bax was targetted by police and injured as policemen hit her over the head with battons. Tahameena is still nowhere near a full recovery. I could continue with many other reports of police violence against women.
What seems to be happening here is a deliberate policy (on the part of the Met - probably from the government) to target women in order to discourage women from coming along to these demonstrations and as such to reduce their numbers and eventually make them appear to be just the work of a small minority of hard-core anarchists and the moronic and macho Socialist Wankers Party.
There needs to be a full enquiry into the violence of male police officers attacking women and girls in these demonstrations, on top of the deliberately political police tactics of kettling demonstrators unnecessarily for very long periods after a demo has finished. Everyone has the right, and indeed the duty, to demonstrate. If the government is using the police to deliberately target female demonstrators in order to discourage them from demonstrating then they are actively discriminating against one group of people.
In my opinion there is clearly a deliberate targetting of girls and women by the police (obviously not to the exclusion of men and boys). There have been too many examples and reports for this pattern to be ignored. Whether it is the result of a deliberate policy of trying to discourage anyone female from protesting, or the result of something more sinister; a group of male police officers who are out of control and wish to indulge their dark, psychiatric fanatsies of misogynistic violence against women is a matter of debate. So whilst Julie may have a point, to an extent, that there was a lot of macho posturing there, it seems to me that there is more to it than that.
I suspect that not only will Lynne Featherstone not be interested in this aspect of equal opportunities but that the tactic of targetted violence will backfire and women and girls will be more determined to demonstrate to get rid of this appalling government. If the Met/Cameron thinks this sort of thing is going to make women cowed and frightened and stay at home, I believe they/he is very mistaken.
"Support the students and hate the gov but a minority of nasty violent macho tossers down here, and not just the police for once".
Her take on the demo being that it was about macho twats on both sides of the police lines, intent on letting their testosterone take over. I can see her point, I haven't been to a demonstration yet where someone hasn't had testosterone problems, but I think it actually represents something rather more sinister than that; targetted violence against women.
OK so I have to admit that I arrived a bit late at the demo (because I couldn't get out of work that day), and my take on it as such may be a bit different. As I arrived, I noticed that the majority of people walking away from it with bloody heads were women and girls. This video, posted to show that the police officer fell off his horse rather than was dragged off it (as Cameron wanted us to think) actually shows, in the background, two women being beaten over the head by a policeman with a truncheon. These women were obviously not threatening anyone, yet they were targetted by a burly male police officer. This report from a girl from Barnsley clearly shows that police officers were engaged in deliberate targetting of women demonstrators, despite them being no threat to the officers involved in committing these crimes. The excellent reports from Laurie Penny have also shown how women and girls are deliberately targetted in unprovoked attacks;
"Fighting for breath, I am shoved roughly through the line by two police officers; twisting my neck, I see a young woman in a white bobble hat pinned between the shields and the crowd, screaming as the batons come down on her head once, twice, and her spectacles are wrenched from her face" (New Statesman 10 Dec 2010).
In the previous demonstration it is clear that Tahameena Bax was targetted by police and injured as policemen hit her over the head with battons. Tahameena is still nowhere near a full recovery. I could continue with many other reports of police violence against women.
What seems to be happening here is a deliberate policy (on the part of the Met - probably from the government) to target women in order to discourage women from coming along to these demonstrations and as such to reduce their numbers and eventually make them appear to be just the work of a small minority of hard-core anarchists and the moronic and macho Socialist Wankers Party.
There needs to be a full enquiry into the violence of male police officers attacking women and girls in these demonstrations, on top of the deliberately political police tactics of kettling demonstrators unnecessarily for very long periods after a demo has finished. Everyone has the right, and indeed the duty, to demonstrate. If the government is using the police to deliberately target female demonstrators in order to discourage them from demonstrating then they are actively discriminating against one group of people.
In my opinion there is clearly a deliberate targetting of girls and women by the police (obviously not to the exclusion of men and boys). There have been too many examples and reports for this pattern to be ignored. Whether it is the result of a deliberate policy of trying to discourage anyone female from protesting, or the result of something more sinister; a group of male police officers who are out of control and wish to indulge their dark, psychiatric fanatsies of misogynistic violence against women is a matter of debate. So whilst Julie may have a point, to an extent, that there was a lot of macho posturing there, it seems to me that there is more to it than that.
I suspect that not only will Lynne Featherstone not be interested in this aspect of equal opportunities but that the tactic of targetted violence will backfire and women and girls will be more determined to demonstrate to get rid of this appalling government. If the Met/Cameron thinks this sort of thing is going to make women cowed and frightened and stay at home, I believe they/he is very mistaken.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
The T-word, contested meanings and cultural imperialism
The erzatz furore over the use of the word “Tranny” by a well-known transwoman has been erupted in an unacceptable way, to my mind. Considering the rather dubious basis for some of the accusations and assertions it is worth considering some of the things those who criticise first and think later (or not at all) didn’t think about.
A hundred years ago, Ferdinand de Saussure made the, actually rather sensible and now apparently quite obvious observation that in language, the relationship between signifier and signified is purely arbitrary. In other words there is no link between the word itself and the object or concept which it represents. There is nothing in the word “tree” which can tell you that it signifies something brownish with a trunk, branches and leaves. The only reason that it does signify a tree is because enough people (ie. those who speak English) agree that it does.
In other words, language and words have meanings which are negotiated and contingent. Of course some words are more negotiated than others but all are contingent to some extent on the way people agree to use them. Of course not all people agree all the time about every word.
Pierre Bourdieu however noted how some language is more privileged than others, and how the power structures and hegemonies of society are brought to bear through language. Language does not inherently have any power, we cannot ascribe agency to something inanimate such as language. Power is exercised by people, through language and it is also the sublties such as tone of voice and body language which affect its meaning. This fits in with Saussure’s view of language and suggests that society exerts power through privileging certain forms of language over others. “He” for example is normally privileged over “she” reflecting the sexist and misogynistic power structures within society.
Gunther Kress however, went a stage further in his analysis of language and noted how linguistic communication is in fact entirely social, and is contingent on a complex relationship between the subject matter, the speaker (or writer), the listener (or reader), and the context. In other words, you cannot separate any utterance from the relationship between the signifier, signified, the communicator, communicatee and the context in which this is all happening. When other variables are factored in, such as the degree of disagreement about the word or words in question, it becomes clear that there are going to be no hard-and-fast rules about the use of any particular element of language which are not contingent on the person communicating, the people being addressed, the situation in which the communication is taking place and indeed the media in which it is being expressed.
As such the use of a word such as “tranny”, the meaning and usage of which is still highly contested, will be difficult to predict in terms of making judgements about its appropriateness or otherwise. Of course in the case of a word like “he”, which is almost completely uncontested in terms of its meaning and usage, it will be much easier to predict and make judgements about the appropriateness of its usage.
To illustrate this, transgender people consider the usage of the word “Tranny” inappropriate in cisgender media. However even here there are going to be exceptions when cisgender media are discussing the appropriateness of its usage, when they are quoting from transphobic hate-criminals or when reporting hate crime or examples of transphobic discrimination. However as a recent survey has shown, there is no evidence whatsoever of any feeling in the trans community that it is wrong for trans people to use this word. As such there is no problem, for most trans people, for a transwoman performing drag calling herself “Tranny”. In the case of Mzz Kimberley’s performances at Transgender Days of Remembrance in London, the additional contextual locating of the performance, that of lifting the mood after a particularly difficult reading of the names of 179 trans people who had been murdered during the year, meant her performance enabled the participants to get over the depressing and sad mood, to help people to regain some kind of optimism to enable them to face the future. As such it was particularly appropriate. Of course one participant (out of about 100) disagreed and made an accusation of transphobia about this, although this is all the more puzzling considering the fact that she didn’t complain a year ago, when the same song was performed for TDoR.
In contrast the use of “he” by Planet Transgender to describe Mzz Kimberly, who clearly identifies as female in her everyday life as well as her performances, is easy to come to a judgement on. It is clearly unacceptable and represents deliberate transphobia. One doesn’t need a survey to know that misgendering is one of the areas in which transgender people and their supporters almost unanimously agree is unacceptable whether it is done by cisgender media or by trans people.
The fact is that, like most words in the English language, or indeed any language, the meaning, implicit or explicit, and connotations of the word “tranny” is always going to vary according to context, subject and person using the word. If I say, “There’s going to be a war” and David Cameron says “There’s going to be a war” the meaning will be completely different. If David Cameron said it in the context of a drink with his friends down the pub or on the steps of 10 Downing Street, it would also have different meanings. To ignore these multiple textual, contextual and social elements to any utterance is to ignore the most important elements of that utterance in terms of its meaning, relevance and importance.
One of the contextual and social elements which people use to judge the importance of any particular utterance on the internet, and especially in the blogosphere, is the extent to which a blogger is willing to permit people to respond and contribute to the discussion and ideas raised in the blog itself. Obviously bloggers who disable comments or who “moderate” large numbers of comments such that many do not appear, should be taken far less seriously than those who are prepared to permit others to respond. Indeed bloggers who do so devalue their ideas by about 99%. By doing so these people are effectively communicating to us that they are not confident enough of what they say to be able to argue it with others. Indeed so many people I know tried to respond to Planet Transgender’s blog that I got several people actually complain to me about it down the pub…
Another variable in this situation is of course, culture. Most people seem to make the mistake of assuming that British and American cultures are very similar because we speak the same language. This is well wide of the mark. British culture has much more in common with those of our north-west European neighbours than it does with that of the United States. One of the features of this is humour and lightening the mood. The best way to illustrate this is ITMA. ITMA, or “It’s That Man Again” was one of the most famous radio programmes of all time, although it is little heard of today. During the dark days of the blitz in 1940-41, when London effectively suffered a 9/11 every day for 9 months, people all over Europe risked their lives to tune in to the BBC to hear news from the free world. Most were surprised, if they tuned in when ITMA was being broadcast, to hear laughter, lots of laughter. In the face of the most brutal and destructive attack on our country in history people were listening to comedy on the radio and laughing.
Different peoples deal with death and horror in different ways. In Britain we tend towards feeling intense pain but then lightening the mood so that we can get on with everything and fight to live another day. TDoR could easily make some people depressed and inaction and resignation can often come from this. Mzz Kimberly’s performance, in the context of our national cultural heritage, was not merely appropriate, it was magical.
At London TDoR I was honoured by being invited to be one of the five people to speak the names of our fallen brothers and sisters. Despite reading out the names and ages of two 16-year-olds and a 16 month old, I pretty much held my British stiff upper lip and did so without too many tears. I allowed myself to weep quietly in my seat afterwards while CN Lester amazingly performed the unenviable task of following the silence with a piece on the piano. While he was doing this I had time, through my tears, to reflect on the list which I still held in my hand. I realised that there were a lot of places where there were no names of dead trans people. The whole of Africa, Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Mongolia. Apart from Turkey and Pakistan there were none from the middle East.
I refuse to believe for one moment that there were no murders of trans people in Damascus, Baghdad, Novosibirsk, Ulan Bator, Guangzhou, Lagos, Volgograd, Harare, Riga, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca or any of the smaller towns an villages in isolated places in these teeming and highly populated nations. The names we read out on the TDoR were clearly just the tip of the iceberg. The real number of trans people who have been murdered last year is probably many times the 179 we read out. In many cases their deaths will never be recorded because they were carried out either by or with the connivance of the states they lived in, or by oppressive religious authorities. This is the real issue, there could be as many as 1,000 of us murdered every year, with countless more driven to suicide. This is what should be uniting us in a determination to fight, rather than throwing stones at others in our community and then running away…
A hundred years ago, Ferdinand de Saussure made the, actually rather sensible and now apparently quite obvious observation that in language, the relationship between signifier and signified is purely arbitrary. In other words there is no link between the word itself and the object or concept which it represents. There is nothing in the word “tree” which can tell you that it signifies something brownish with a trunk, branches and leaves. The only reason that it does signify a tree is because enough people (ie. those who speak English) agree that it does.
In other words, language and words have meanings which are negotiated and contingent. Of course some words are more negotiated than others but all are contingent to some extent on the way people agree to use them. Of course not all people agree all the time about every word.
Pierre Bourdieu however noted how some language is more privileged than others, and how the power structures and hegemonies of society are brought to bear through language. Language does not inherently have any power, we cannot ascribe agency to something inanimate such as language. Power is exercised by people, through language and it is also the sublties such as tone of voice and body language which affect its meaning. This fits in with Saussure’s view of language and suggests that society exerts power through privileging certain forms of language over others. “He” for example is normally privileged over “she” reflecting the sexist and misogynistic power structures within society.
Gunther Kress however, went a stage further in his analysis of language and noted how linguistic communication is in fact entirely social, and is contingent on a complex relationship between the subject matter, the speaker (or writer), the listener (or reader), and the context. In other words, you cannot separate any utterance from the relationship between the signifier, signified, the communicator, communicatee and the context in which this is all happening. When other variables are factored in, such as the degree of disagreement about the word or words in question, it becomes clear that there are going to be no hard-and-fast rules about the use of any particular element of language which are not contingent on the person communicating, the people being addressed, the situation in which the communication is taking place and indeed the media in which it is being expressed.
As such the use of a word such as “tranny”, the meaning and usage of which is still highly contested, will be difficult to predict in terms of making judgements about its appropriateness or otherwise. Of course in the case of a word like “he”, which is almost completely uncontested in terms of its meaning and usage, it will be much easier to predict and make judgements about the appropriateness of its usage.
To illustrate this, transgender people consider the usage of the word “Tranny” inappropriate in cisgender media. However even here there are going to be exceptions when cisgender media are discussing the appropriateness of its usage, when they are quoting from transphobic hate-criminals or when reporting hate crime or examples of transphobic discrimination. However as a recent survey has shown, there is no evidence whatsoever of any feeling in the trans community that it is wrong for trans people to use this word. As such there is no problem, for most trans people, for a transwoman performing drag calling herself “Tranny”. In the case of Mzz Kimberley’s performances at Transgender Days of Remembrance in London, the additional contextual locating of the performance, that of lifting the mood after a particularly difficult reading of the names of 179 trans people who had been murdered during the year, meant her performance enabled the participants to get over the depressing and sad mood, to help people to regain some kind of optimism to enable them to face the future. As such it was particularly appropriate. Of course one participant (out of about 100) disagreed and made an accusation of transphobia about this, although this is all the more puzzling considering the fact that she didn’t complain a year ago, when the same song was performed for TDoR.
In contrast the use of “he” by Planet Transgender to describe Mzz Kimberly, who clearly identifies as female in her everyday life as well as her performances, is easy to come to a judgement on. It is clearly unacceptable and represents deliberate transphobia. One doesn’t need a survey to know that misgendering is one of the areas in which transgender people and their supporters almost unanimously agree is unacceptable whether it is done by cisgender media or by trans people.
The fact is that, like most words in the English language, or indeed any language, the meaning, implicit or explicit, and connotations of the word “tranny” is always going to vary according to context, subject and person using the word. If I say, “There’s going to be a war” and David Cameron says “There’s going to be a war” the meaning will be completely different. If David Cameron said it in the context of a drink with his friends down the pub or on the steps of 10 Downing Street, it would also have different meanings. To ignore these multiple textual, contextual and social elements to any utterance is to ignore the most important elements of that utterance in terms of its meaning, relevance and importance.
One of the contextual and social elements which people use to judge the importance of any particular utterance on the internet, and especially in the blogosphere, is the extent to which a blogger is willing to permit people to respond and contribute to the discussion and ideas raised in the blog itself. Obviously bloggers who disable comments or who “moderate” large numbers of comments such that many do not appear, should be taken far less seriously than those who are prepared to permit others to respond. Indeed bloggers who do so devalue their ideas by about 99%. By doing so these people are effectively communicating to us that they are not confident enough of what they say to be able to argue it with others. Indeed so many people I know tried to respond to Planet Transgender’s blog that I got several people actually complain to me about it down the pub…
Another variable in this situation is of course, culture. Most people seem to make the mistake of assuming that British and American cultures are very similar because we speak the same language. This is well wide of the mark. British culture has much more in common with those of our north-west European neighbours than it does with that of the United States. One of the features of this is humour and lightening the mood. The best way to illustrate this is ITMA. ITMA, or “It’s That Man Again” was one of the most famous radio programmes of all time, although it is little heard of today. During the dark days of the blitz in 1940-41, when London effectively suffered a 9/11 every day for 9 months, people all over Europe risked their lives to tune in to the BBC to hear news from the free world. Most were surprised, if they tuned in when ITMA was being broadcast, to hear laughter, lots of laughter. In the face of the most brutal and destructive attack on our country in history people were listening to comedy on the radio and laughing.
Different peoples deal with death and horror in different ways. In Britain we tend towards feeling intense pain but then lightening the mood so that we can get on with everything and fight to live another day. TDoR could easily make some people depressed and inaction and resignation can often come from this. Mzz Kimberly’s performance, in the context of our national cultural heritage, was not merely appropriate, it was magical.
At London TDoR I was honoured by being invited to be one of the five people to speak the names of our fallen brothers and sisters. Despite reading out the names and ages of two 16-year-olds and a 16 month old, I pretty much held my British stiff upper lip and did so without too many tears. I allowed myself to weep quietly in my seat afterwards while CN Lester amazingly performed the unenviable task of following the silence with a piece on the piano. While he was doing this I had time, through my tears, to reflect on the list which I still held in my hand. I realised that there were a lot of places where there were no names of dead trans people. The whole of Africa, Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Mongolia. Apart from Turkey and Pakistan there were none from the middle East.
I refuse to believe for one moment that there were no murders of trans people in Damascus, Baghdad, Novosibirsk, Ulan Bator, Guangzhou, Lagos, Volgograd, Harare, Riga, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca or any of the smaller towns an villages in isolated places in these teeming and highly populated nations. The names we read out on the TDoR were clearly just the tip of the iceberg. The real number of trans people who have been murdered last year is probably many times the 179 we read out. In many cases their deaths will never be recorded because they were carried out either by or with the connivance of the states they lived in, or by oppressive religious authorities. This is the real issue, there could be as many as 1,000 of us murdered every year, with countless more driven to suicide. This is what should be uniting us in a determination to fight, rather than throwing stones at others in our community and then running away…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)