Category: rage at the system

Time to pick a side

I see a lot of fence-sitting, and it pisses me the fuck off. I see so many so-called comrades refusing to challenge the multi-layered oppressions within our own communities.

Time and time again, I see feminists proudly declaring that they want to be neutral to various issues. In its latest manifestation, this has been a complete apathy towards a payday loans lawyer with a history of harassing women and actively siding with homophobic organisations in her quest to make the lives of marginalised young women hell. However, this attitude frequently comes up when women of colour report racism, when trans women report cissexism, when disabled women report disablism, and so forth.

I see it happen repeatedly within anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-state networks. A deliberate neutrality towards sexism and racism among white men, too often escalating to the point where women reporting sexual violence from comrades are disbelieved. The other day, my friends and I tried to challenge it. So many comrades just stood by and did nothing.

This sort of shit happens everywhere. Intersecting liberation struggles are treated as nothing more than a petty spat, a minor intellectual difference. Instead of solidarity, there is only apathy. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told “I really agree with everything you do, you’re wrong about [really important issue], but I can ignore that.” How in the name of ever-loving fuck can you willfully look away from something so integrally connected?

This position of self-proclaimed neutrality is not some sort of moral high ground. It is actively harmful. Yes, you may not be actively perpetrating violence, but your inaction allows the perpetrators to keep on doing what they do. Think of the murder of Kitty Genovese. A young woman attacked and brutally murdered, while many heard her screams and did absolutely nothing. Kitty Genovese could have been saved, but the inaction of her neighbours left her to die in terrifying circumstances. The decades of subsequent research have revealed that people have a remarkable capacity for justifying their own inaction when someone is being harmed. I don’t doubt that the comments will swell with a sea of self-deception as people try to validate their own apathy, and do you know what? I’m not going to fucking approve any of it, because I’ve heard it all before.

If you don’t take a stand against oppression, you are helping it happen. You are helping the bigots and the rapists, the murderers and the fascists. You are helping the powerful exert their power and making them ever stronger.

It might make your life easier, but it also makes the task of the oppressor far, far easier. When solidarity is diffuse because so many just stand around doing nothing, it is easier to abuse and harass and murder. You are not neutral, no matter how much you like to think you are. You are helping all of this happen. You are not neutral, you are listening to the abuser’s account and deciding you like it better.

So let us dispose of any notion of neutrality. Let us open up our eyes and let in the full picture of the raging injustices. Let it disgust us, and develop our understanding of what is really happening, to actually look at the direction in which the power flows and everything connects together. Let us look at the consequences of our past apathy and strive end victimisation. Let us challenge oppression wherever it appears: within and outside our own communities. Let us nail our colours to the mast and rise up against these abusive structures.

It is a terrifying task, taking a stand, because the powerful just want to swat us down. They cannot do this if we stand together in solidarity with one another: there are too many of us. Let us ally our struggles and end this oppressive facade of neutrality.

Kill the SWP inside your head

Content note: this post discusses rape and rape apologism

Another woman has come forward with an account of her experience of sexual violence within the SWP, and how the disputes committee handled it. My heart goes out to her, as it does to all of the survivors.

Once again, I am filled with rage that this organisation with its inbuilt mechanisms for avoiding accountability for sexual violence continues to exist. I am fucking furious that people continue to be members of the SWP. Once again, I must state that I will never organise with them, or any of their front groups. This is both in accordance with the survivor’s wishes, and is also very much in accordance with my own personal feeling. I want to see them hollowed out and rotting then burned atop a pyre of their own shitty, shitty newspapers.

I will never organise with the SWP, and if you care a jot about sexual violence and its location within a broader liberation struggle, neither should you.

In a way, it is easy to see how the SWP found themselves in this position, and how easily something similar could happen within any radical circle. The ingredients are all there. We were all born and raised into a system wherein even those of us who are not cops absorbed a hell of a lot of cop lies about rape. That the survivor is possibly making it up and it requires investigation. That rape allegations will ruin a man’s life, and therefore ought to be investigated thoroughly. That there must have been some reason, some mitigating factor that made this happen: was the survivor drunk, or giving mixed signals, for example? That evidence is required to conclude the investigations. That the survivor doesn’t know best about what will begin the process of healing, it is a decision for someone else to make.

These lies and myths are ingrained. They are why so many of us will not go to the police, but they are also why so many of us would not report our rapes to our own friends.

These lies and myths need unlearning as a matter of urgency. For things to get better they can be and they must be. They need to be as forgotten as the charred skeleton of the SWP. All of this can happen again if we do not tear the rot out at the roots and let go of these rape apologist beliefs.

So kill the SWP inside your head. Identify which of these beliefs you have swallowed, and unlearn and undo them. Make sure you will not be another disputes committee. Challenge these beliefs in your community. Make sure your community is not just another SWP.

And remember the wishes of the survivor. Do not organise with rape apologists.

The Sun’s mental health splash: it’s not about the numbers

No doubt a lot of you will have seen the front page of the Sun today, announcing that people with mental health problems are big stabby monsters who will murder you. If you haven’t, this is literally their front page.

I have the “privilege” of peeping behind the Scum’s paywall, so I checked out the article. It will surprise literally nobody that the data are totally wack, and to make up for the lack of content, the Scum added a lot of pictures of pretty girls who were killed by the scary mentals. Oh, and in a particular double V-sign, they then add a small box pointing out that people with mental health problems are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

If you’re interested in the actual facts surrounding dangerousness and mental health problems, you can download a fact sheet here. In short, even the Sun can’t manage to substantiate their front page claim.

But here’s the thing: it’s pretty easy to attack the figures, because they are a nonsense. But in doing that, we lose sight of what is really going on here. We stop asking the questions that need to be asked. Why on earth would the Scum decide to whip up a panic about people with mental health problems?

We live in a society where there is a vast stigma surrounding mental health. Small gains are occasionally made: nice national treasure celebrities can now talk about their depression and so forth, and a fuss might be kicked up about naughty supermarkets selling nasty costumes. It really isn’t enough, though, and as we dig our way towards being treated with basic human dignity, we hit wall after wall after wall.

Our mental health marks us as other, and we become acceptable targets in a society built around kicking the marginalised at every opportunity. It is no surprise that it is the oppressed who are scapegoated for everything that happens, and not the privileged. It is no surprise that the Scum decided to pick the weak rather than splash THOUSANDS KILLED BY MEN. It is no surprise that this will go far less challenged than the fact that they print pictures of norks on the third page.

If the climate of fear remains, we will remain alienated. This stigma can kill. It keeps us lonely, stops us from healing, and it blames us for our own isolation.

And this allows those with the power to continue doing what they’re doing, to maintain their chokehold relatively unchallenged. They are able to perpetrate these assaults, and we continue struggling uphill to fight against tropes that should have died a long time ago. It keeps us down, it keeps them up.

Does it terrify those with the power that the oppressed are gaining a voice? I think it does, and this is why they keep turning up the volume on their attacks. They are scared of us, and want everyone else to be, too. It’s working, perhaps, and that scares me.

The Scum have a rich history of lying about those without power. We know this, but we choose to attack the easy bit rather than the harder bit: that society is built this way, and needs so much to change before most of us can exist comfortably within it.

Use the Sun as kindling, but there’s a hell of a lot we have to burn.

Dear David Blunkett

Dear David Blunkett,

I was surprised and disturbed by your somewhat revisionist historical analysis. In case you’ve forgotten the speech you gave, these is the alarming sentiments you articulated:

“The Lib Dems in Glasgow debated this and decided they were against automatic protection unless people chose to over-ride it, in terms of pornography on the internet and the protection of children. I think they were wrong.

“I think we have a job in this country, in a civilised, free, open democracy, to protect ourselves from the most bestial activities and from dangers that would undermine a civilised nation.

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.

“People fed on that – they fed people’s fears of it. They encouraged their paranoia. They developed hate about people who had differences, who were minorities.

“There always has had to be some balance, in terms of the freedom of what we want to do, for ourselves and the mutual respect and the duty we owe to each other in a collective society. I think getting it right is the strength of a democracy.”

See, the thing is, David, I’m not convinced that Weimar was the worst era in modern German history. It was a pretty decent time to be queer, really; we were accepted. It also wasn’t too bad to be a woman: our sexual agency was accepted and abortion was actually legalised in some cases, almost a century ago! The music was cool: they embraced music like jazz. It was progressive, in short, and marginalised people were treated more like humans than the little bit of history that came later.

That little bit of history that came later, David, was Nazi Germany, the spectre you raise as a consequence of not treating marginalised people like shit. Those who were accepted in the Sodom and Gomorrah times suffered heavily under Nazi Germany. The queers were forced to wear pink triangles and herded into camps, murdered in droves by the state. The women were treated as breeding machines, nothing more than a means of reproduction. The rich art and culture made by people who were not white, once embraced, was now illegal, degenerate. It was a period of history which sucked absolutely enormously for basically everyone who was not a straight, cis, able-bodied white man.

For some reason, you think this was the responsibility of exactly the people who suffered the most. You know who else thought that? Hitler.

I am writing to you, David, to express concern because I am fairly sure that you have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum by twisting Godwin’s Law so much. I presume you’re decrying Nazism and saying it’s bad, while simultaneously using some rhetoric with a distinctly fascist flavour. Of course I’ll help out if some of the Sleeping Ones awaken and pass through the portal you have opened, but I’m a little annoyed that I have to, to be perfectly honest.

On the other hand, David, I’m grateful. What could I possibly be grateful for, when you are essentially blaming millions for their own genocide?

I am grateful, David, that you have laid bare the inherent authoritarianism in the moralistic attitude towards banning porn. I am relieved to see that you have managed to point out that ultimately this isn’t about porn itself, but it is far wider, and far more chilling. It is rooted in a hatred of all that is not straight, a rejection of sexual freedom for women. It reflects a disgust at the queer. You have demonstrated this with your words far more clearly than all of the commentary that comes from the marginalised.

So fuck you, and all who share your views. You frighten and sicken me, as do all who agree with you.

No love,

Stavvers

EDIT 02/10/13: I made Blunkett feel sad.

Why I signed the statement of trans-inclusive feminism and womanism

At the time of writing, 158 feminist and womanist individuals and organisations have signed a statement of trans-inclusive feminism, myself included. It is sad that such a thing needs to exist in 20-fucking-13, but it’s vital that we are vocal in our opposition to feminisms which decide to exclude women. I will quote my favourite part of the statement below.

By positing “woman” as a coherent, stable identity whose boundaries they are authorized to police, transphobic feminists reject the insights of intersectional analysis, subordinating all other identities to womanhood and all other oppressions to patriarchy.  They are refusing to acknowledge their own power and privilege.

It is so important to acknowledge that transphobic feminisms are not just wrong, but dangerously so, and this statement does just that. Please read the whole statement and share it as much as you can! We need to be vocal about the unacceptability of bigotry in feminism.

Feminism and control of other women

This week’s issue which is calling some premium-grade nonsense to fly forth from the mouths of feminists is the topic of banning face coverings, specifically the niqab. It is something which appeals to politicians, satisfying both their desire for racist policy and managing to get a bonus bit of giving themselves further reason to mass arrest protesters as a shitty little cherry on top. As always, there are hordes of feminists who are perfectly happy to deal with this as it manages to sate their appetite for controlling other women.

I don’t think I need to go into why getting the state to dictate what women may and may not wear is hardly a feminist position, and is simply a manifestation of a white saviour complex. Go and look at what Muslim feminists are saying about this; this is not my argument to make.

Among certain strains of feminism, we see a lot of attempts at controlling what other women do, wear and exist as.

We see it in Nadine Dorries, who calls herself a feminist while simultaneously craning her neck for the best viewing angle of our uteruses. She literally wants to control our reproductive freedom, and believes this stance to be a feminist stance.

We see it in the TERfs, the bigoted feminists who bully and harass trans women for existing, who spread lies and misinformation, who exclude and who try to deny access to treatment. They call themselves feminists, yet they are trying to control women’s bodies, to set themselves up as gatekeepers to womanhood through establishing a firm grasp on what a woman must be like.

We see it in a lot of high-profile campaigns calling for bans on this or that manifestation of sex work. Behind all of this is a desire to control what work is acceptable for women to do. We see it in the entire prohibitionist angle towards sex workers.

Am I saying these people are not feminists? No.

They are feminists. They are simply feminists who will ultimately do more harm than good.

See here’s the thing. It’s a little bit Captain Obvious to suggest that patriarchy places controls on women’s bodies and women’s behaviour. We know that this is terrible and bad and we rightly kick up a fuss about it. And yet to many women, the control imposed by certain strains of feminism is just as bad as these manifestations of patriarchal dominance. It is no different, aside from the perpetrators. And this is why we see so many marginalised women turning away from feminism: feminism just appears as rebranded patriarchy, rebranded control and coercion.

The feminists who want to control other women will defend their stance by saying that the women they are attempting to control need rescuing somehow, that this control is salvation. You will note that they are never trying to save themselves, only others who are somehow letting the side down by letting themselves be oppressed.

And yet this defence is much the same as the patronisingly sexist attitudes we face from men. We don’t know what’s good for us. We need someone to sort it out for us, someone who knows best. We are literally incapable of knowing what it is we need.

We reject it from men, and we must also reject these impositions of control from women.

If we want to help marginalised women to be liberated, our task is not to lead or to legislate, but to listen. We need to ask what help is required, rather than barging in like a carceral Leeroy Jenkins and making everything worse. It is support, not control, that will lead to freedom.

The police and instrumentalising survivors

Content note: this post discusses rape 

On Saturday night I sat shivering outside a police station with a bag of cereal bars and a friendly smile, waiting for comrades to be released from police custody following their mass arrest for Standing While Antifascist. Police came and went from the station, and eventually a car rocked up full of plainclothes cops, one of whom I’m pretty sure I recognised from actions and so forth; a meat-headed hegemonically masculine fucker.

Unsurprisingly, comrades were vocally critical of the police, particularly as it was a day where more than 280 people had been arrested for Standing While Antifascist. The police were asked what good they thought they possibly served in their role of police officers.

And they went on the defensive with a tired old line I’ve heard a thousand times before. “Tell that to the rape victims [sic],” they said. “Tell them we’re not doing any good.”

I’m not sure why it hit me so hard this time, but I kind of shut down. Full anxiety, unable to form words bollocks. Basically, I knew I would either cry or hit one of those jowly-faced pricks, and neither option was particularly appealing as showing weakness in front of pigs is almost as bad as assaulting one directly outside a cop shop. And so my brain decided to temporarily BSoD.

And now I’m left thinking of what I should have said, what I would have said had I been able to.

I’m thinking of how perhaps I could have said that as a survivor myself I never wanted to go fucking near the police because who on earth would? I would not want their sausage fingers probing my recently-violated flesh, hands more suited to violence than to aid. I wouldn’t trust the sensitivity of that porcine pair in any of it.

I’m thinking of how perhaps I could have pointed out the numerous fuck-ups that the police as an institution have made. Losing evidence, dropping cases on purely arbitrary criteria, all adding to unnecessary additional trauma. I could have mentioned how their Sapphire unit seems to be under a near-perpetual state of reshuffle as yet another survivor is let down. I could have mentioned how they continue to pump out propaganda placing blame on the survivor rather than the perpetrator. I could have mentioned how when police officers rape, it is often treated as an internal matter, only misconduct, much like fudging some paperwork (although, often their fudged paperwork happens to help perpetrators). I could have mentioned how they deceive women into sex to collect information on them. I could have mentioned how all of these failings put together paint a picture that suggests they cannot possibly be so awful by accident. I could have asked them whether they think their all-round hideousness contributes to the fact that the vast majority of rapes go unreported.

I’m thinking of how perhaps I could have asked why they had decided to point at an area where they are mostly contributing to a culture of violence by their inaction, rather than their usual method of actively perpetrating violence; in particular on a night where they were holding hundreds of non-consenting people merely because they had Stood While Antifascist.

I’m thinking of how perhaps I could have said that it is utterly disgusting that they use rape survivors as human shields against criticism. We are people, not an abstract concept which helps the filth sleep at night, that allows them to pretend to themselves that they are somehow doing good. We are not a trump card to be played, nor are we a distraction from the utterly unjustifiable. It is vile to instrumentalise human beings, yet this is what the bastards do time and time again. And it is horrible to see this line trotted out, confirming suspicions that this is all the police think of survivors. A problem to be solved so they have a success story so they can deflect attention away from their own thoroughly inexcusable violences.

I said none of this, because I was scared and anxious and angry and upset through their behaviour. I said none of this because as a woman and a survivor, the presence of gigantic meaty men who position themselves as gatekeepers for justice makes me feel fundamentally unsafe. I said none of this because I do not think it would have swayed them at all: they are incapable of reason, and it was not worth my while.

Fellow feminists and survivors, never forget that the police are not our friends.

Against equality

I am sick of bigots standing in the way of liberation struggles. Whether feminism, anti-racism, advocacy for people with disabilities, queer rights, trans rights and so on, they smirk and they go “Personally, I believe in treating everyone equally, so no special treatment for you”. It’s bullshit, and anyone with a semi-formed analysis can see straight through that nonsense.

They whine and they moan when people demand to be treated like fucking human beings, eliding the fact that oppression exists by pretending that they’re that much of a shit to everyone. And maybe, just maybe, they are that much of a shit to everyone. It doesn’t stop the fact that their behaviour hits some people harder than others, a fact which has never occurred to them, as in their feeble blinkered outlook it’s impossible to understand what it’s like to be anyone else that isn’t a bellowing turd.

I’m sick of hearing about equality from governments, a bunch of self-nominated gatekeepers with no clue whatsoever of what the word actually means. They scrawl something down on a piece of paper and decry any responsibility when it turns out that people are actually shit. The same goes for any organisation with an equality policy. You say the words, and expect them to  become true. This might work in some kinds of magics: the true name of the demon is not “equal opportunities” and no matter how many times you say it, it isn’t going to be banished.

But most of all, I am absolutely fucking sick of activists banging on about equality. It betrays a devastating lack of imagination. From marriage equality to demanding better representation in boardrooms, all that is being requested is to maintain the power structures which bind us, while allowing a few more individuals to become masters.

So what if 50% of women become MPs? The system is still thoroughly broken. We still have gatekeepers, we still have masters. So what if queer people can serve in the military? We still find ourselves in a position wherein arbitrary groups are murdering each other based on an argument between some rich people in a faraway room are having. So what if people from marginalised groups get to be the CEOs? The most of us still toil, alienated from the fruits of our labour while those at the top become ever more powerful.

Fuck equality. I don’t want to be equal to people as utterly fucked as me. I want to be free. I want for us all to be free. I want us to be free from these structures which clip our wings, causing us to live hand to mouth, constraining the way we live and love, scapegoating those who are even more fucked. I want us to be free from being represented, and representing anyone else. I want us to be free to be: to exist in the way we want to without hate, without fear.

I want to be able to want, and to get.

I wonder, sometimes, what it is that people who beg for equality actually want. Do they think it some sort of transitional demand, with liberation as the actual goal? If so, they should know by now that going with cap in hand and begging something small only gets you something smaller. Or are they largely happy with the way things are, comfortable in their privilege if only one or two small tweaks were made? If so, they are complicit.

Either way, I am exasperated by this talk of equality. Don’t ask for equality. Demand liberation. Those who benefit will think us unreasonable, because they are happy profiting from our suffering. And that doesn’t matter a bit. They’ll never give us what we need, no matter how nicely we ask. Grind the fucking master’s house to dust.

Have we really declined so much that self-appointed leaders will settle for scraps and declare victory? We cannot allow this. Let us liberate ourselves from our attachment to equality.

When #ibelieveher goes out of the window

Content note: This post discusses rape, transphobia, apologism and the effect of not being believed when reporting one’s experiences.

We are seeing a slow shift how we think about survivors, guided by the phrase “I believe her*”. It inverts the status quo; politically siding with survivors, a statement of undoing the way things are by believing the story of a person who we are socialised into not believing. Disbelief in the accounts of survivors of rape, of domestic violence, of child abuse creates the conditions of silence necessary for such abuse to continue. Fear of not being believed is a weapon, wielded by our culture to keep our lips sealed and prevent anything being done about it. It is an attempt to create a safer space.

It is gaining momentum, this culture of believing survivors, and has been broadly adopted by many groups striving for social change. Sadly, while the ethos of believing survivors is perhaps becoming increasingly accepted, the practice itself is often not. We have seen this, for example, too often amid left-wing groups who will happily say they believe survivors until it turns out one of their mates might be a perpetrator, and cognitive somersaults begin in order to justify what is going on.

We see it too when people talk about their experiences of microaggressions. While it’s easy to believe when women talk about gendered microaggressions, those times when we are made to feel less than human by something which is often dismissed as trivial by patriarchal society, this is not extended to women experiencing intersecting oppressions. We see, for example, trans women talking of feeling invalidated and attacked by high-profile cis women to a reboant chorus of dismissal. Far from being believed in these scenarios, trans women end up being on the receiving end of the same old apologist tropes: the victim blaming, the trivialisation, the gaslighting and the flat-out denials. We see similar things happening to women of colour, to disabled women, to sex workers and queer women. Suddenly, it’s not “I believe her”. It’s a demand for a case laid out, meticulous documentation of “evidence”. If evidence is produced, it is thrown as an overreaction or not really evidence at all. Or perhaps everything is explained at the survivor having somehow “brought it on herself” by not behaving exactly according to some unwritten, unknowable, ever-shifting code.

It’s the same tune played on a different instrument. Whatever happened to “I believe her” in these situations?

As a cis white woman, sometimes I find it difficult to recognise where exactly the problem lies. I am not sensitive to some microaggressions, because I am not subjected to them day after day after fucking day. I am never on the receiving end of cissexism or racism, and, as such, sometimes I fail to recognise very veiled abuse. Which is precisely why, when a woman of colour or a trans woman says it is happening, I believe her.

As a cis white woman, it’s not my place to explain that something isn’t racist or cissexist, because I don’t get to define what these things are, and what is crossing a line and what is not. So, when I listen to a survivor, I believe her.

I feel like this is the least I can do. I’ve had experience with not being believed, I’ve had experience of being on the wrong end of victim blaming, I’ve been gaslit and dismissed when I talk about horrible things which have happened to me. I know how awful it can be, that sense that either the world will end or you will, that you’re mad and you’re wrong and you’re twisted and disgusting. I also know that feeling of the light coming in as you hear the magic words “I believe you”. Not being believed hurts like fuck, and being believed makes the pain more bearable, like you might just be able to get through it. It’s helpful when someone else sees the gas go down, too, even if they don’t quite understand it as well as you do.

And so these are the principles I use. I believe those who talk about microaggressive abuse. I believe those who talk about rape. I believe survivors. I believe her.

__

*This is not to say abuse does not happen to people who use male and non-binary pronouns. Of course it does, and the sense of belief ought to be extended to anyone reporting such experiences. However, this short phrase also encapsulates the gendered nature of such abuse.

We need to talk about rape, “deception” and trans people

Content note: this post discusses sexual violence and systematic transphobia

The Court of Appeal has codified into UK law that trans people who do not disclose their trans status could be considered sex offenders. For full commentary and exploration of this ruling I urge you to read this whole post on Complicity, but to summarise:

The judgement goes on at length beyond this and is also concerned with the accuracy of legal advice given, but there appears to have been some doubt as to how aware M was about the gender situation. Given they were both teenagers, possibly confused about sexuality and on one side gender, this perhaps isn’t surprising.

Essentially it goes on to say that although the burden of proof is with the prosecution, if you’re trans and out yourself to someone prior to any sort of sexual act – even touching – then it would be best if you can prove it, in case they (or their parents) later try to prosecute. A Gender Recognition Certificate would, I hope, be a defense – but having read the judgement, I’m not certain.

Quite how you prove you told a partner without outing yourself to all and sundry, putting yourself at risk of physical violence, loss of employment, homelessness etc is not addressed in the judgement.

As zoeimogen points out on Complicity, similar precedents do not exist for not disclosing, for example, marital status. They do not even exist for not disclosing whether or not one has HIV. It is a really, really bad ruling with potentially horrifying implications for the trans community. It creates a climate of fear, a hostile environment. Ultimately, it means that if a trans person is raped by a cis person, the cis rapist could turn the tables and declare that actually their survivor was the rapist for not disclosing.

If you think this is some kind of exaggeration, I invite you to look around the world to see other examples of how legislation has been set up to stop trans people from being able to seek justice through legal channels, and cis people claiming trans people are rapists. In Singapore, in the US, in Sweden, in India where they recently rewrote their rape laws so only cis women could be raped. They are legislating away the possibility of a group of people–already more vulnerable to rape–to be raped.

This is common, and this is systemic. It grows from a combination of factors making it sadly inevitable. The general attitude of dehumanisation towards trans people. The notion that it is genitals that are gender. That “trans panic” is considered a valid defence. The insistence that trans people are some sort of intruder and deceiver, sneakily infiltrating the dominant cis supremacist order. And yes, we cis feminists are complicit in this. When trying to make change, we sometimes forget our trans sisters, accidentally throwing them under the bus. Then there’s the actively bigoted feminists, who want to see this happen. It’s not just feminists, generally social justice activists are very poor on remembering that trans people exist, and bigoted when they do.

Tomorrow, the Pride celebrations are going on in London. Ostensibly a celebration our pride in being LGBT, the whole thing is built on a history of throwing trans people under the bus. The role of trans women in kicking off the Pride movement is all but erased from memory, and tomorrow we shall be celebrating the passage of the UK same sex marriage law which throws trans people under the bus.

We look away, far too often, but for trans people the option of looking away is not there. And if we are to make things right, we must not look away. We must look and talk about these horrors, because our silence has allowed them to grow and grow. We must address cissexism, within ourselves and within society. We need to talk about this ruling, because it is an entirely logical extension of a system that many of us have unwittingly contributed to. We must look, and we must work to unpick every thread which wove this vile cloth.

We need to talk about all of this, because it is not OK.

__

Thanks to @metalmujer for the links to worldwide instances of similar cases.

ETA: some shit I’ve cocked up on. Link to what I did wrong. Unedited post in the interest of honesty and transparency.