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trans-advice · 4 years

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Hey, for the past 5 or so years I have privately identified as nonbinary or not conforming to any gender, and even recently requested that my boss and coworkers use they/them pronouns. About a month ago I stumbled across a "gender critical" blog and started reading it. I know it's a bad idea to engage with trolls, especially when it will impact your sense of self, but I felt restless that my existence was being debated and wanted to hear the other side. Now I am feeling confused (1 o 2 asks)

I’m feeling confused and gross, wondering if all this time I have been actually working against my own feminist beliefs, or if I’m just being naive and getting indoctrinated. Like,I worry about me being a female who simply didn’t subscribe to gender stereotypes, tricking myself into thinking I"wasn’t like the other girls". I have also been wondering about what it means to identify into an oppressed group, and why we can’t talk about it without being dismissed as a dumb TERF. (1 o 2 asks) Thx

— Eve: CW: long post, possibly rambley, could’ve used better editing, transphobia, “gender critical”, recuperation, discussion of “terf” politics, recuperation of liberation movements, politics, oppression, rape culture, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist,

So basically I have tried for almost 4 weeks to write a response detailing this stuff. however it’s gotten too unwieldy. i tried to condense it, but this was as close as i got. it’s practically like 3 drafts back to back. I couldn’t figure out the differences & when i saw similarities it seemed significantly different enough. so I’m not editing any further. here’s a mindvomit. i wish i had this more polished but I can’t do that & i didn’t get a response.

however I’m going to make a history book recommendation, a referral to gendercensus2020, and i need to emphasize that these are much more like personal beliefs & not generally the tone of this blog which aims to give advice & positivity, while this is inherently political, the good bad & ugly. and there are trans people of various persuasions so I don’t want alienate them. i dissecting some ideologies that are transphobic, how they became that, how they got recuperated, and how you can find the same concerns being addressed. I’m answering this because it totally makes sense to me that this is asked in good faith & I want to respect your concerns & show that there are better methods of liberation activism that are trans affirmative, or at least must become & develop into such.

So I’m going to recommend the book “Transgender History (Second Edition)” by Susan Stryker, which I have put on our blog’s google drive account, so hence a link. It goes into the historic common ground between the feminists & LGBT+ peoples. It also gets into historic movements. And on top of that, the first chapter is literally a list of terminology deconstructing gender, which is also helpful for analyzing topics feminism analyzes..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvCwNvCJ_EiDmOer4zS8SbFGz4m-WDJ1

another thing you need to know regarding the label lesbian back in the day is that it was a catchall for any woman who didn’t have sex with men. now granted, this was a cisnormative understanding, but basically lesbians included celibate women, asexual women, and of course bisexual women in addition to gay women.

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money to have sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (granted, communities cannot be monoliths if they want to be ecosystems, like any movement label there are different interpretations made by members of it, and therefore there are some strands that uphold a homonormative appreciation for conversion therapy. perhaps a middle ground for understanding how that happened is that joke about macho sexuality purity “if a man masturbates with his hand, he’s using a man’s hand to get off, then it’s gay.” granted, there was of course a political/economic reason to this, but still, it seems in terms of history that this joke was considered actually legitimate.)

“lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included ace, celibate & gynephiliac women. part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married which I’ll detail a few paragraphs from now. (while this next thought could be incorrect because I did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, I think the vestiges of those economic pressures are basically the gist of “comphet”.) the goal of political lesbian as well as lesbian separatism was to build an economy/get money that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, via marriage, pregnancy etc. so basically in an effort to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

however these networks ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. it makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210] >

birth control helped to liberate women & that accommodation/handicap for reproductive health disabilities (disability is merely inability to do something that’s Normative. so if having a uterus, pregnancy/menstruation/having breasts etc aren’t considered normal, which is especially common in a patriarchal society for these examples, then it’s disability.) It should be said that due to the desire for bodily autonomy to regulate our own body parts, as well as a desire to manage our fertility & sterilization, the transgender movement has a lot in common with feminism’s female-as-disability movement.)

it should also be noted that before the medical transitioning became accessible that us trans people relied a lot more on social transitioning than medical transitioning. it should also be mentioned that the medical procedures are available & used by cisgender people too.

that being said, since both cis females & transgender women were denied birth control etc, there was a very intense fear of impregnation happening & trans women going back in the closet not only to get money under patriarchy but also because life raising a kid is hard. like if you’ve ever seen “the stepford wives” & look at how the ally husband betrays his feminist wife, then that should clue us into how a lack of birth control scared us.

the problem with the school of feminism that emphasizes physiological sex over gender identity (in order to deny the existence of trans people with female-organs or not) is that it doesn’t account for birth control & how that’s affected the landscape, the economy etc, the revolutionary impact of birth control basically. it also ignores that trans people & cis women feminists have the same goals when it comes to getting freedoms about reproductive rights & bodily autonomy. therefore it ends up being transphobic & wanting to run back into the times when we didn’t have abortion access because they want to hurt us.

That being said though, we need to have birth control & more in order to help liberate trans people too, so if somewhere doesn’t have birth control, then we’re not doing well either because it’d pay a lot more to be transphobic (which of course it doesn’t now when we have birth control & various medical & other technologies). i think what I’m trying to say is that similar to disability accomodations clashing with each other, if we of the women’s liberation, the trans liberation, and the gay & lesbian liberation, and the bisexual & ace liberation get stranded then we’re all doomed. granted we might be doing that due to defensiveness with hostility similar to how in the 1980s feminism got very conservative in USA & how some transgender people get spared in systems with strict gender conformity & anticolonialist values, it’d be wrong to say that all our liberations are in conflict with each other. they can be mishandled, but ultimately, safety still tends to favor cisheteropatriarchal people. internalized patriarchal thinking is like internalized queerphobia, and so forth.

I want to emphasize that it is relatively easy for transgender people especially nonbinary people to find gender critical discourse somewhat appealing. Here’s why: TERFs & Gender Critical discourse is agender-normative disability discourse regarding reproductive health & other AFAB organs. (a disability is being unable to do things that society considers normative. so if you can’t drive & your locale de facto requires it, then that’s a disability. also in usa you’ll find that pregnancy & disability are the main things welfare programs prioritize. a pregnancy can be harmful, but can be easier with the right monitoring etc. which again is the same with disability.)

the problem though is that they then insist on misgendering you as one of the binary genders based on objectification of your body (specifically, “morphology”). point being, because you feel dysphoric over being misgendered as something nonbinary as being mislabeled as cisgender, this implies that you are indeed transgender.

https://gendercensus.com/post/612238605773111296/the-gender-census-2020-is-now-open

—

Now to be clear, there are historical economic considerations that made the decisions to specialize on the intersectionality of cisgender AFABs, but the economy & technology has changed. Basically marriage back in the day was economically necessary because there was effectively no birth control available. Therefore, to get child support etc, required getting the father to pay the consequences. However, marriage was very much a chattel property institution, marital rape was still legal, and women couldn’t get credit etc in our own names.

At the same time, similar to birth control being unavailable, hormones & other procedures for medically transitioning trans people were unavailable as well, which meant social transitioning & wardrobe etc were the main methods of affirming our gender. however, we sometimes got lucky & had a doctor write us a note affirming our gender & sometimes we got even luckier & govts accepted this. this however required getting labelled sick & begging doctors to give us treatment & getting money for this since insurance companies etc still discriminated against transgender people even when we agreed to have our gender identity situation labelled as sick & medically necessary. (similarly insurance companies still refuse to cover abortions & so do some doctors & hospitals.)

So this meant that AFABs were concerned about getting hijacked via impregnation. Because of the patriarchal economics of the whole thing, people were afraid of “the stepford wives” repeating itself in their own lives, where the mind can only handle what the ass can stand would mean trans women would go back into the closet.

Granted, that’s a bit misrepresentative of trans women & trans people because trans people & cis women who can get pregnant do have a lot more in common. we take the same meds, go to the same clinics, menopause etc gets taken due to distress over how our bodies work, etc. then again, how would trans AMAB people have gotten the money for child support?

historically & still to this day we basically had to beg doctors for the ability to get hormones to get a surgery to get a gender marker change & so on, which granted, what we trans people had available to us varied from locale to locale because it required collaborations of trans people, doctors, and the local govts & especially their police stations. again, before roe v wade abortion providers were super underground & secretive & there were specialized units at police stations for hunting down patients & providers under the charge of “murder”. it’s the same dynamics.

seriously trans people & people with bodies that can get pregnant, menstruate, menopause, etc, we go to the same clinics! women’s health clinics take trans patients, planned parenthood takes trans patients, do i need to go any further on how trans people & feminists have the same interests regarding reproductive health?

—

as for political lesbianism:

basically the normal advice of wait til you have your own money before having sex, wait til your mid 20s, don’t rely on a man to pay your bills etc, all of this comes from political lesbianism, which was like be celibate or else have sex that doesn’t involve sperm. (i’m not sure what the conditions were like surrounding not piv sex among the straights, and therefore what the likelihood of avoiding piv sex was. I do know that rape culture was much more heavily normalized than it is now.)

“Lesbian” was a catchall for women who didn’t have sex with men. this included: - ace, - celibate - bisexual - gay women. Part of the reason these communities were conflated again had to do with the economic pressures to get married, (while this next statement could be incorrect because i did just learn about ‘compulsory heterosexuality" a month ago, i think the vestiges of those economic pressures such as weddings are basically the gist of “comphet”.)

The goal of Political Lesbianism as well as Lesbian Separatism was to build an economy that didn’t require submission to patriarchy, such as that of marriage, pregnancy etc. In efforts to build like support networks, “men” were shunned as much as possible.

However these networks, (partly due to lacking radicalization) ended up replicating capitalism, (partly due to oppression against communes & other anti-capitalist activities) which then replicated the oppressions of capitalism. It makes sense that transphobia had formed of assimilation/respectability politics for such feminists. To quote from the criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the women’s liberation movement.

> “The philosophy practised by liberationists assumed a global sisterhood of support working to eliminate inequality without acknowledging that women were not united; other factors, such as age, class, ethnicity, and opportunity (or lack thereof) created spheres wherein women’s interests diverged, and some women felt underrepresented by the WLM.[208] While many women gained an awareness of how sexism permeated their lives, they did not become radicalized and were uninterested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social arrangements, but were unwilling to take action on issues that might threaten their socio-economic status.[209] Liberationist theory also failed to recognize a fundamental difference in fighting oppression. Combating sexism had an internal component, whereby one could change the basic power structures within family units and personal spheres to eliminate the inequality. Class struggle and the fight against racism are solely external challenges, requiring public action to eradicate inequality.[210]”

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tmitransitioning · 5 years

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there's a post going around that we don't know anything about the vascular system of the vulva/vagina and this is inherent misogyny, and the op and terfs are also talking about how this is evidence of female-based-oppression including in trans issues because "everything is tailored to males' anatomy including bottom surgery, we know how to do MTF surgery better because of this!" and that didn't sound right to me, like they implied doctors don't even know about this.

we (medical professionals) do know less about the internal anatomy of the vulva/vagina/clitoris than the internal and external anatomy of the penis/testicles, and it does stem from a patriarchal prioritization of the “male” anatomy. In school, “female” anatomy is much less thoroughly covered than “male” anatomy (source).

MTF surgeries began before FTM surgeries (Elbe and Richter predate Dillon by at least 15-20 years, depending if you use the date of the first or the last surgeries). we do significantly more MTF surgeries each year than FTM surgeries, (and generally at a lower cost, assuming you want a phalloplasty that you can penetrate with)

all of this isn’t accidental and it’s not TERF propaganda. (i’m certainly not saying that trans women have it better/easier, please don’t misunderstand me). because doctors know and are taught the anatomy of the penis better than they are taught the anatomy of the vulva they are better able to work skillfully with it.

this one factor doesn’t discount the overwhelming difficulties that trans women face that trans men don’t.

mod mayhem

This is in the same vein as reproductive rights debates surrounding abortion. There, the primary reasons that access to abortion is routinely attacked have to do with misogyny. But part of that misogyny is reducing people with that set of body parts TO those body parts, and subsuming their will. Because most people are cis, and social gender roles have developed in many places based on that, a certain set of body parts and a certain phenotypic expression have become associated with the gender role of "woman".

For many transphobes, their transphobia is part and parcel of maintaining gendered systems of oppression—if you start thinking hey, why DO we associate bodies with social gender so strongly when there is omnipresent evidence worldwide that variation in both physical development and social gender systems exists, then the whole concept of patriarchy starts to fall apart. As trans people, our existence is a direct attack on the idea that Men Are Just Naturally Superior Because Biology.

So, go back to the first paragraph I wrote—abortion is attacked because it's associated with women, NOT restricted to them. This is also where you get into super thorny debates over how trans people who aren't women are impacted by misogyny, which is a terrible discussion to have on this platform, but the reason that these discussions exist is because of how strongly the ideas of this binary cis biological determinism have been applied to our sciences and social structures. The reason medical professionals don't cover vaginal anatomy as stringently as penile is due to historical misogyny, but the REASON that the two have become linked is not an inherent law of the universe, it's a conscious construction.

This argument is a good example of TERFs taking actual facts and then doing absolutely no analysis whatsoever because they've bought right into the same biological determinism that patriarchal systems use to enforce gendered oppression. They're thinking of these anatomical structures as being inherently male or female, instead of things commonly-but-not-always associated with those sociopsychological gender roles. The extension of this outside of trans issues, then, is punishing cis women for not being fertile, or punishing intersex women for varying from the prescribed biological norm—the latter also factors into punishing trans women, though transmisogyny is a lot more complex than just that. Or, if you want to take it further—punishing cis women for being lesbians and thus not fulfilling their "role" in a patriarchal system, or for having short hair when that is a trait most commonly socially associated with men, or for not shaving, or for being fat... it goes on and on.

Short version: Sex-based oppression, nope. Also not an example of trans women having "privilege" that they don't. An example of gendered oppression via the division of humans into an ordinal dichotomy, which necessitates enforcing a certain set of traits as associated with one category or the other: Yes, but recognizing this doesn't mean buying into that trait division.

Shorter, snapper version: TERFs loooove reducing the idea of "woman" down to whether or not they can pop out baybeez.

- Mod Wolf

#genital anatomy #Anonymous

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michaelbranch · 3 years

Text

A Brief Summary of Ideas: The Madness of Crowds

*These summaries are kept intentionally very brief, just hitting what I consider some of the important/interesting takeaways, most word-for-word or paraphrased. My goal is also to stick to ideas/principals that might guide others (or my future self) in deciding the value of a read (or re-reading). T = takeaway, Q = Question

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity

Author: Douglas Murray

Assumption that a heightened moral knowledge comes with being an oppressed/minority group. "Speaking as a ..."

All these causes started as legitimate human rights campaigns.

Gay

Can't award yourself the right to attribute motives to others that you can't see but which you suspect. Prerequisite for avoiding perpetual confrontation is an ability to listen to people's words and hold some trust in them.

Problem of changing societal positions so swiftly is that unexplored issues and arguments are left behind in the wake.

We still don't have much idea as to why some people are gay.

Hardware = something people can't change (and thus shouldn't be judged on). Software = can be changed (and thus may be available for judgement). Inevitably there will be a push to make some software issues into hardware.

LGBT groupings composition is unsustainable and contradictory. Internal frictions and contradictions even within groupings.

Some heterosexuals are genuinely disturbed by gay people. Plenty of stages between absolute equanimity and ease around people and a desire to violently attack them.

Marxist Foundations

See society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions evolved over time, but solely through the prism of power.

Anyone who questions an "ism" finds themselves accused. Easy weapons to wield with no price to pay for wielding them unfairly.

When it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said, and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity. T= be weary of arguments that can't be presented simply.

Women

Society has doubled down on the belief that biological difference can be denied or ignored.

T= When people make exaggerated claims about what someone else said, its likely an example of people deliberately and lazily adopting simplified misrepresentations of the argument in order to avoid the difficult discussion that would otherwise have to take place.

Contradictory statement = possible to be sexy without being sexualized

Presumption that almost all relationships in the workplace and elsewhere are centered around the exercise of power. Various types of power; many parties can hold different ones.

Privilege is unbelievably hard to define or quantify. How can strata be arranged to be flexible enough to include everyone but consider various comparative changes throughout life. Also, easier to see in others but more difficult to see in ourselves.

Intersectionality is not a fully worked out science.

Concept of the patriarchy has become so ingrained its rarely disputed.

Impact of Tech

If we are running in the wrong direction; tech helps us run faster.

Internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying. To find people accused of "wrong thing" works because it rewards the bully.

"The one thing we can say with certainty about the advent of new technologies is that people overestimate their impact in the short term and underestimate their impact over the long term." -Variously attributed.

What we say in one place may be posted in another, not just for the whole world but for all time. Having to find a way to speak and act as though it may be in front of everyone. To speak in public is now to have to find a way to address or keep in mind every possible variety of person.

T= Don't sacrifice truth in the pursuit of a political goal.

Race

Some portion of black studies started attacking non blacks. Growth of "whiteness studies" w/ aim of disrupting racism by problematizing "whiteness". Displaces celebratory nature of many race studies to with problematizing others.

Catastrophizing has become one of the distinctive attitudes of the era.

Q= Should we seek color blindness (get beyond race to individual judgement, making skin color effectively an unimportant aspect of a person's identity)?

An idea that since everything was set up by a structure of white hegemony everything is laced with racism and therefore everything must be done away with.

If people got things so wrong in the past, how can you be sure you are acting appropriately today?

Important in crowd maddening mechanism: person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Rewards outrage over sanguinity.

Politicizing issues such that the speaker and their innate characteristics don't matter. What matters is the speech and ideas they give voice to.

Easy(er) to slip up not on an issue of motive but, especially when no other evidence is available, a crime of language.

Social media age has brought us opportunity to publish uncharitable and disingenuous interpretations of what other people have said.

Equality of opportunity AND outcome almost certainly impossible.

Forgiveness

T= Context collapse: conversation/act taken out of context and used to create a simplified version of a person or their beliefs.

Q= How, if ever, is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs during their life there must be - in any healthy person or society - some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. The internet will never forget.

Actions have consequences that are unbounded and limitless. Constantly acting in a web of relationships in which every action starts a chain reaction. A single word or deed could change everything.

Without being forgiven we would remain the victim of the consequences forever.

T= Historically perpetrators and offended both die out and the grievance fades over time. Internet leaves a permanent record.

Internet helps people approach the past from an all-knowing angle. Retributive instinct of our time that suggests we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and how we "would have" behaved.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven in return.

Trans

Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying.

A considerable range of cultures has adapted to the idea that some people may be born in one body but desire to live in another.

For intersex people, the question of what medical intervention might be suitable and when is a matter of serious contention.

Very hard to know how to navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony.

Still almost nowhere near understanding trans; including how common it is.

Autogynephilia: arousal that comes from imagining yourself in the role of the opposite sex.

Q= whether what one person believes to be true about themselves has to be accepted as true by other people?

Questions about the age at which people who believe they are in the wrong body should be allowed to access drugs and surgery are worth considering.

Q= What do you need to do to be content with your body, not change it?

Seems we're running to quickly on the trans issue, scared to be on the wrong side of history.

Some contention between trans and feminist ideas.

T= little contention that equal rights should be given. Issue is preconceptions and assumptions about how to go about tackling the issue.

Q=Claims of human rights violations are inversely proportionate to the number of violations in a country. -Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Only a very free society would permit (or encourage) claims about its own inequities.

T= when people attempt to sum up our societies in terms of simplistic structures ask, "compared to what". Not to say elements of our society can't be improved.

The victim is not always right, nice, deserves no praise, and may not be a victim.

Incline towards generosity when interpreting others words/acts.

-People are wiling to interpret remarks from their own tribe in a generous light while reading opposing ones in as negative a light as possible.

To assume that sex, sexuality, and skin color mean nothing would be ridiculous. To assume that they mean everything would be fatal.

The madness we are living through is an over-reaction to past injustice. Belief is that the fastest and best way to address this is to over-compensate.

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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years

Note

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to me that you are moreso against the radical and irrational side of "feminism" as opposed to the actual egalitarian mentality from whence it came. (Granted, early suffragettes were of course not perfect in their inclusivity, however I feel that the movement has developed into something more inclusive over time.) In this case I agree with your views, as the whole "men are the worst and they can die" mentality never really sat right with me. (1/3)

There’s three parts to this so I’ll just summarize the rest. You make the point that I’m entitled to criticize feminists because they “aren’t real feminists” and you suggest I should spend more time highlighting “the real” feminism and “the good feminism”. The only problem is, this noble, all inclusive feminism you speak of no longer exists here and if it does, it’s sure as hell hard to find. Please, point me into its direction.

Feminism was hijacked by the second wave feminists decades ago, they began creating these wildly flimsy theories about the patriarchy, male privilege, men being our oppressors, the glass ceiling, toxic masculinity, social constructionism and oppressive gender roles and began shaming women who wanted to stay at home and be a mom or wife.

These theories began being printed into university text books, they began to be published in the news and magazines and people began to believe it and take it on as fact. These feminists broke the golden rule of teaching which is impartiality and began asserting their own beliefs and their theories to their students. None of these professors have backgrounds in biology, anthropology, endocrinology - their background is Marxism.

As time has gone on, these fabricated theories painting men as the oppressors and women as the oppressed have turned our next generation of feminists (third wave/modern feminism) into seeing themselves as victims and oppression is part of their existence. When oppression is everywhere, they then theorize new injustices such as the wage gap, rape culture, microaggressions, the male gaze, mansplaining, the desperate need for safe spaces and trigger warnings.

When you see yourself as the perpetual victim then you feel you are entitled to special treatment, you’re entitled to silence “hate speech” and you’re entitled to lash out at anyone who doesn’t oblige. The irrationality and radical views and actions that yourself have acknowledged, you can’t say “this isn’t real feminism” when this is the feminism being taught by feminists to feminists students in feminist classes. This is the feminism that has been spread all throughout academia, the media, social media and politics. It’s time to face facts.

Just because today’s feminism has become irrational, deceitful and hateful, it doesn’t stop it from being feminism and it doesn’t make these women any less of feminists than you. You clearly see there is a problem, yourself called it irrational and radical, so why aren’t you doing anything to speak out against it and fight against it to reclaim “the good” feminism? Feminism is a choice, it’s an ideology that anyone can sign up to and nobody is governing feminism so nobody gets to say what is right or wrong feminism.

Pro-trans feminists say TERFS aren’t real feminists, TERFS say pro-trans feminists aren’t real feminists, black feminists say white feminism isn’t real feminism, they say intersectional feminism is the only feminism, conservative women can’t be feminists, Trump supporters can’t be feminists but then anyone who believes in equality we are told automatically makes them a feminist. It’s no different from saying Muslims with radical views and commit radical crimes aren’t real Muslims. Just because the Muslim we are friends with in college aren’t lashing and hanging gays and aren’t stoning women who are raped, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t standard Islamic practice elsewhere and these aren’t real Muslims enforcing it. Just brushing it off as not being real and turning a blind eye is not helping anyone.

As I’ve said all throughout my blog, my problem isn’t with feminism as an idea or the early women’s movements, it’s with what it has become today and the impact it’s having not only on young women but also young men. Today feminism teaches women to see themselves as victims and victims cannot exist without a villain, this villain is men. In order for this thesis to have any kind of logic, feminists have made sweeping, inaccurate judgments about an entire demographic, based on nothing more than their gender. Ironically, the exact practice they claim to be fighting.

Feminism teaches her it’s acceptable to study a dead-end, worthless degree or work long tedious hours as it surely has to be better than being a housewife or stay at home mom and then blame mythical patriarchies when it doesn’t get them anywhere and it doesn’t make them as happy as feminism told them it would. Feminists believe that women should be protected from certain aspects of public life, including speech. Women can’t and shouldn’t deal with certain types of speech deemed offensive. They do not want to engage in aspects of life they disagree with.

They want zero accountability or standards set for women and all blame and responsibility to be on men. Anyone who calls out their theories and narrative -because from the very beginning they have been based on biased manipulation and false and exaggerated statistics - they cannot reply with anything other than “bigot! sexist! misogynist! Islamophobic!” - it’s their only argument. How is any of this empowering women?

I’m all for feminism being about body positivity for women, inspiration and advice for women and protecting women who truly need protecting. I also think a brand of non-PC feminism is desperately needed to give Islamic women the same freedom and rights as we all have here and break them out of genuine Islamic patrairchy and oppression but this feminism doesn’t exist, to even suggest such a thing is called Islamophobic and gets shut down by you guessed it - feminists. You say feminism fights for equality so why are they booting out women who disagree with them? Why are they booting out women who voted for Trump? Why are they shaming women who want to be housewives and stay at home moms? Why aren’t they fighting for men? Why aren’t they fighting for Islamic liberation?

Until feminists are willing to have an honest and open discussion, until they’re ready to scrutinize their movement, until they’re ready to hold women and minorities to the same standards they hold white men, until they practice what they preach and become respectable and responsible advocates for real equality, their attempts to force people into joining feminism simply for believing in equality will continue to be a filthy scam that’s making plenty of old feminists rich and that’s something we all must repel until change and reform is ready to be made.

#myreplies #feminism1

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how2to18 · 6 years

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“Laughs exude from all our mouths.” — Hélène Cixous

“Comedy, you broke my heart.” — Lindy West

IN A BIT about sexual violence in his 2010 concert film Hilarious (recorded in 2009), the now-infamous Louis C.K. says: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” I was delighted when I first encountered this joke on Jezebel in July 2012 in a post called “How to Make a Rape Joke.” Lindy West was responding to the social media controversy surrounding American comedian Daniel Tosh, who had recently taunted a female heckler with gang rape. West’s insightful essay later led to a 2013 TV debate with comedian Jim Norton as well as her best-selling memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, where she describes the fallout of becoming one of the United States’s best-known feminist comedy commentators, including her subsequent, painful decision to stop going to comedy shows.

In “How to Make a Rape Joke,” West wondered whether it is ever okay to approach sexual violence with humor. She wrote that she understood and respected those, like the woman who called out Tosh, for whom it wasn’t, categorically. The sexual assault of women poses a special problem for comedy, she reasoned, because it is an expression of structural discrimination against women. That is, unlike misfortunes such as cancer and dead babies known to befall people at random, if you’re a woman, not only do you face a one in three chance of becoming a target of sexual violence, but you will also likely be held at least partly responsible for it. To illustrate the inappropriateness of jokes about this kind of a situation, she drew a comic analogy between patriarchal society and a place where people are regularly mangled by defective threshing machines and then blamed for their own deaths: “If you care […] about humans not getting threshed to death, then wouldn’t you rather just stick with, I don’t know, your new material on barley chaff (hey, learn to drive, barley chaff!)?” Compassion about a culturally loaded form of suffering would seem, automatically and intuitively, to preclude humor about it. Yet West’s own humorous reframing demonstrated what she ultimately decided: that you could be funny about sexual violence if you “DO NOT MAKE RAPE VICTIMS THE BUTT OF THE JOKE.” In particular, Louis C.K.’s rape joke then earned West’s stamp of approval because, in her words:

[It] is making fun of rapists — specifically the absurd and horrific sense of entitlement that accompanies taking over someone else’s body like you’re hungry and it’s a delicious hoagie. The point is, only a fucking psychopath would think like that, and the simplicity of the joke lays that bare.

Though her recent New York Times piece “Why Men Aren’t Funny” makes it clear that West now regards her defense of Louis C.K. as a relic, her sharp distinction between acceptable and unacceptable jokes in “How to Make a Rape Joke” set the standard for mainstream feminist discussions of comedy for a good five years.

While I find West compelling, in my own efforts to navigate the contemporary feminist ethics of humor throughout this period, I’ve been resisting the impulse to draw limits. Instead, I’ve been looking back to the debates over sexuality that were central to North American feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the so-called sex wars, feminists agreed that sexuality had always been held in a patriarchal stranglehold but disagreed about what to do about it. The Women Against Pornography saw explicit sexual representations as the very basest mechanisms of female sexual oppression and so focused their energy on educating the public about their harms and prosecuting pornographers. By contrast, sex-positive feminists, as they came to be known, claimed that trying to shut down or cordon off unacceptable expressions of sexuality only exacerbated the problem. They argued that the history of criminalization and widespread fear of any sex but the reproductive, romantic, married kind had not only led to the marginalization of sex workers, lesbians, gay men, trans people, and many other so-called sexual deviants, but also cast sexuality as such into the shadows. Targeting pornography was therefore counterproductive. As Susie Bright, vocal defender of the sex-positivity movement and founder of the first women-run erotic magazine, put it:

porn [can be] sexist. So are all commercial media. [Singling out porn for criticism is] like tasting several glasses of salt water and insisting only one of them is salty. The difference with porn is that it is people fucking, and we live in a world that cannot tolerate that image in public.

Sex-positive feminists actively chose not to contribute to this climate of moral panic, focusing instead on unearthing the deeply embedded mainstream prejudices around sexual practices and fantasies. Instead of turning away, they faced sexuality head on, acknowledging debts to the small minority of people — sexologists, fetishists, queers, sex workers, erotic performers, and indeed pornographers — who had already begun exploring human sexuality in all its complexity, often with little socioeconomic support and at the risk of criminal charges. By many accounts, it was this unabashed approach to sex that led to the development and popularization of safe-sex protocols and consent education later in the 1980s.

There are of course, limits to the comparison of sex and humor, especially given that the impact of hetero-patriarchy on sex is much more immediately visible. Nevertheless, I would suggest that sexuality and humor are not merely analogous, but are in fact overlapping categories of feminist experience. Both are understood to be culturally coded but with powerful bases in the body. Like sex, laughter has historically been considered an unruly instinct, even by the very philosophers who have most rigorously examined it. As scholars like Anca Parvulescu, John Morreall, and Linda Mizejewski have variously shown, the stigma of humor, like that of sex, has been intricately interwoven with its designation as an irrational impulse and with gendered and racialized notions of embodiment. Moreover, there is a shared double standard regarding both laughter and sex: both have been imagined, paradoxically, as things that men have to cajole “respectable” (implicitly white, cisgendered, pretty, heterosexual) women to do and, at the same time, as things that transgressive women instinctively want to do, in excess. The dangers of both sex and humor have been encapsulated in the figure of a woman open-mouthed and out of control. In the early ’80s, the influential sexuality scholar Gayle Rubin observed that the most common symptom of our culture’s general fear of sex, or “sex negativity” as she called it, is the very impulse “to draw and maintain an imaginary line between good and bad sex.” That is, while various mainstream discourses of sex differ from one another in terms of the value systems they deploy and their level of overt misogyny, their views of sex are, ultimately, remarkably uniform: “Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular, or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically correct” and, once the lines are drawn, “[o]nly sex acts on the good side […] are accorded moral complexity.” Wary of simply rerouting sexual shame, sex-positive feminists instead actively cultivated a nonjudgmental stance.

This might seem the worst possible moment to advocate for an equivalent form of humor positivity, let alone with reference to a joke about sexual violence by Louis C.K. In the wake of the public exposure of numerous celebrity serial sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, the viral #MeToo campaign has uncovered thousands of male harassers and abusers, and pointed to millions of others as yet unnamed. Since C.K. confirmed reports of his nonconsensual exhibitionism, some of the feminist anger and despair that was already rippling across popular and social media is being directed specifically at the industry that gave him his power. Many mainstream feminists, not least West herself, feel more prepared now than ever to throw the bathwater of comedy out along with the many baby-men who have been cavorting in it. Yet, as I see it, it is precisely in the context of our well-justified outrage that humor positivity is most needed. Humor is a vital, elusive, and continually evolving aspect of human experience. Like sex, it has repeatedly served oppressive ends, but it is no more essentially or necessarily discriminatory an impulse than sexuality is. It is undoubtedly important that we probe and resist the misogynist culture of mainstream comedy. At the same time I propose a change in the way we personally and collectively engage with the material this industry trades in — that is, the jokes themselves.

How might we ensure compatibility between the jokes we hear or make and the tools and concepts that shape our responses? How can we prevent our resistance to certain jokes from reproducing the (historically patriarchal) marginalization and stigmatization of the desire to laugh? If we get used to approaching jokes with trepidation, expecting offense, how might that wariness affect our political movements? In the current feminist conversation, these questions have begun to be raised in, for instance, Cynthia Willett, Julie Willett, and Yael D. Sherman’s “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Feminist Laughter,” Jack Halberstam’s “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s “Comedy Has Issues,” and Berlant’s “The Predator and the Jokester.” My sense is that what we especially need now are some clear and concrete principles and practices for humor-positive feminism. Here are three lines of inquiry that I hope may help us to develop a richer set of responses to comedy going forward.

Can we develop a more complex and flexible view of humor’s power dynamics?

One of the major contributions of sex-positive feminism to our current understanding of sexuality was the recognition of seemingly counterintuitive forms of agency from below. Sex-positive feminists showed us the through line between the patriarchal suspicion of sexuality and certain feminist critiques of sexual exploitation. Though the fear of sex was originally and widely promulgated in medical, religious, and legal discourses, some of the alternative schemas of anti-porn feminists heightened the idea that most sex is inherently terrifying. For instance, Catharine MacKinnon’s view that “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual — in fact, is sex” — while it helpfully exposes sexual violence as a structural problem — also makes it impossible to distinguish consensual heterosexuality from rape. Sex-positive feminists turned to the less moralistic disciplinary frameworks of sexology, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired in part by the subversive theories of power of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, they insisted that saying yes or no to sexual contact, including sexual domination, was a fundamental form of sexual participation. Moreover, they saw that the patterns of giving, taking, and sharing power through sex are much more various and unpredictable than — and sometimes run counter to — the arrangements delimited by basic socioeconomic and patriarchal paradigms.

A first step for developing a similarly nuanced take on the power relations entailed in humor could be examining and loosening up our often-unconscious obsession with the cruelty of laughter. In the philosophy of humor there are at least three ways of characterizing laughter, which can help to parse the differences between various jokes, as well as modes of delivery and reception. Today humor philosophers are most convinced by the idea, first fully elaborated in the 18th century, that laughter is a response to incongruity: something familiar suddenly looks strange, and the resulting sense of surprise pleases us. Another branch of humor theory draws on psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious. Relief theorists, most famously Freud, have emphasized the way that jokes, like dreams, trick us into considering ideas that we normally repress: laughter specifically manifests the giddiness of released inhibitions. These two modern theories of humor are largely compatible. Amusement does not necessarily degrade its objects but may imaginatively reframe or transform them, circulating power between tellers, laughers, and their objects in any number of ways.

The oldest and still most popular notion of humor, however, is one that presupposes and depends on hierarchical and unidirectional power relations. Superiority theory perceives laughter as the expression of unexpected pleasure at discovering our own excellence relative to the things we laugh at. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Superiority theory initially emerged alongside and is consistent with explicitly elitist political ideologies. It may be the only theory of humor children instinctively grasp: even at an early age, the phrase “That’s not funny!” is understood to mean not what it literally implies — “What you’ve said is not amusing to me and could never amuse anyone” — but rather “That hurts my feelings.” For kids, joking about the wrong thing is an ethical violation; it simply moots the possibility of laughing. These days, distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable jokes seem to put a modern, grown-up face on superiority theory. But jokes labeled as “offensive” or “inappropriate” are determined to be “not funny” in more or less the same way that kids mean it. The tropes that oppose “punching up” to “punching down,” coined in the early 1990s by the feminist satirist Molly Ivins, have been crucial in the popularization and liberalization of superiority theory. Those phrases also put a deceptively simple spatial spin on the relative socioeconomic power of laughers and objects. Reinforcing a David and Goliath moral code, the tropes imply that jokes are crucially aggressive in form, but that in some cases violence is justified. It’s okay — heroic even — to take on a bigger meaner guy, but undoubtedly a bad thing to pick on someone littler and weaker than you.

Of course, jokes can be hurtful, sometimes intentionally so. However, taking cues from sex-positive feminists, we might want to stop simply assuming that they are. Just as consensual sexual relations of domination and submission may look like abuse to those who don’t understand the rules, so might some apparently mean jokes. Think of insult comedy or a roast, where the target welcomes the jokes that really sting. But the larger and more important point is that, more than any other factor, our theories of humor will determine our perception of any joke and of the social and political arenas in which they are being made. Keeping our minds open to the possibility that surprise or relief rather than aggression may be the primary affect or intention will better equip us to see the various, potentially contradictory, facets of any comic provocation. Mainstream feminist critics have specific reasons for rejecting jokes about sexual violence: for some survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress, the power dynamics of humor and of assault can sometimes feel so painfully intertwined that certain jokes are experienced as violations akin to the initial trauma. Yet it is precisely because the very perception of aggression can recharge past suffering that it seems important to remember humor’s other impulses. Recently, artists like Emma Cooper, Heather Jordan Ross, Adrienne Truscott, and Vanessa Place are turning to humor expressly in an effort to destigmatize the experiences of sexual assault survivors and change the tone of our conversation. How might a more general focus on humor as incongruity or relief also help to reduce the frequency or intensity of fight-or-flight responses and open up new aesthetic, therapeutic, and political prospects?

Can we develop a more thoroughgoing and flexible view of the rhetorical and performative aspects of humor?

In recent years, I’ve often been surprised to hear irony or ambiguity denounced in feminist humor criticism, as though it would be possible, if people would just say what they really mean, to be assured of a perfectly direct transmission of ideas or a fully inclusive joke. For example, in her study of the dangers of rape jokes, Lara Cox reiterates the superiority theory view that the pleasure of irony depends on “the idea that there is someone out there who won’t ‘get’ the nonliteral nature of the utterance” — and these dupes are “the joke’s ‘butts’ or ‘targets.’” In his study of race humor, Simon Weaver distinguishes between polysemous jokes, which inadvertently reinforce racism, and clear jokes, whose antiracist message cannot be mistaken. I worry that such arguments seem to disavow the fundamental slipperiness of language. Contributing in their own way to North American sex positivity, Frenchpoststructuralist feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous underscored that words have never been equipped for transparent representation. While many jokes do depend on linguistic play, comedians are not responsible for the essential arbitrariness of their medium. Words will always interact and impinge on one another; signification will always be subjectively, historically, and politically inflected, by both speakers and listeners, in myriad ways. Reminding ourselves of the basic wildness of language — and the range of meanings and identities that this wildness makes imaginable, especially in jokes — can temper our anxiety about the inevitability of misinterpretation.

At the same time, let’s attend more carefully to the theatricality of humor, including the jokes and quips that bubble up spontaneously as part of ordinary conversation. In particular, stand-up comedians are in character even when they speak as themselves, and many comedians regularly adopt multiple personas, some of whom channel views that they find especially awful or absurd. Very often these views are already in the air, and the comedian, by giving voice to popular perceptions, hopes to draw fresh attention to them. Moreover, comedians tend not to put on and take off these various personas like so many hats, but rather to alternate and layer them, turning some up and others down, as if each one was a different translucent projection on a dimmer switch. These uneven amplifications of characterization actually generate the dialogic structure of comic performance, as stand-up scholar Ian Brodie explains: “The audience is expected to try to determine what is true [that is, closest to what the comedian generally thinks] and what is play. The comedian[’s] […] aim is […] to deliver whatever will pay off with laughter.” Staying conscious of these shifts will help us to recognize that the most challenging moments — those moments when we don’t know quite where to locate a comedian’s values and commitments — are not incidental but central to the interpersonal dynamics of stand-up comedy.

How can we expand our theories of laughter’s social conditions and effects?

Our most definitive and intense experiences of laughter tend to be in groups of three or more. For most of us, sex and humor are different in this respect. And humor theorists have written very engagingly about the feelings of communion potentially generated through laughter. Ted Cohen writes, for example, that laughing together “is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.” However, as Robert Provine and others argue, we have so much more to learn about humor’s social aspirations, from the vantage of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and many other disciplines besides. Feminists will have a lot to contribute to this inquiry, not least because we know to be skeptical of any account of collective social experience that neglects to factor in the uneven distribution of socioeconomic resources and respect and because we are acutely aware of the likelihood of exclusion and humiliation within any diverse group, and the likelihood that these bad feelings will remain invisible to the most entitled people in the room.

As we help to flesh out our understanding of the social benefits and costs of humor, however, I hope we will get better at waiting for the initial wash of feeling to pass before assigning political positions and moral values to jokes, their tellers, and our own and others’ responses. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, some pro-porn feminists have recently been exploring the consumers’ prerogative in shaping their reception of any sexual representation, regardless of its intended public. In an essay called “Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta,” Jane Ward contemplates her taste for mainstream porn and proposes that,

We need […] a means of “queering” porn that doesn’t rely on filmmakers to deliver to us imagery already stamped with the queer seal of approval, and that doesn’t automatically equate queer viewers with queer viewing. […] Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms?

Many of the most successful comedians purposely write material that can reach very different audiences. What if we were to recognize that as listeners or consumers of jokes we have a comparable level of freedom in determining a joke’s meaning, of finding a place from which the joke can be funny to us? Adapting Ward’s question, we might consider: “Can we have a feminist laugh at a discriminatory joke?” Especially given the current state of US and world politics, some humor researchers have been perturbed to discover that certain satires appeal to both progressive and conservative viewers alike. But if humor, like sex, can make strange bedfellows, that capacity to bring people together may be something not — or not only — to fear, but also something to maximize strategically and even celebrate. Even when we’re laughing for different reasons, couldn’t the fact that we’re doing so across too-familiar divides be invigorating in unpredictable ways?

To consider how humor-positive feminism might differ from the censuring approach that is dominant now, let’s return to C.K.’s 2009 joke. It starts with a basic prohibition — “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone” — then follows with a rationalization of nonconsensual sex that completely overrides that prohibition: “Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” The statements contradict one another and the speaker’s casual diction suggests that he has made a habit of justifying acts of criminal violence. In 2012, West’s superiority theory of humor dictated that her central critical task was to work out who was most hurt by this crazy illogic and determine whether or not that hurt was deserved. She implicitly centered the shift in C.K.’s delivery from one statement to the next, reading these lines as a joke that mocked the perpetrator-persona’s twisted thinking. Feminists had permission to laugh, and in fact wanted to laugh, she argued then, because we felt confident that all of us, including C.K. himself, were not just much nicer but also much smarter than the asshole he was briefly inhabiting on stage. However, C.K.’s recent confirmed sexual misconduct has thoroughly destroyed this version of the joke by eroding the distinction between C.K.’s own voice and that of his perpetrator-persona. As playful distance has given way to painful alignment, the liberal superiority theory must seek a new target. From this vantage, the 2009 joke — insofar as it can still be construed as an utterance capable of eliciting laughter — has to be recognized for what it actually always was: a trivialization of rape.

When West was writing “How to Make a Rape Joke” in 2012, C.K. was appreciated by feminists for regularly raising difficult questions about white heterosexual male privilege. This status provided an important touchstone for West’s feeling that his rape joke, unlike many others, was critical of rape culture: “Louis CK has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better.” Already by the time she was writing her memoir, however, West had stopped actively defending this joke — “I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality.” In recent weeks, C.K. has been made a symbol of one of the most insidiously misogynist formal features of confessional stand-up comedy: the way the whole audience is made to share in the comedian’s personal shame. According to this revised binary feminist view, everyone who ever laughed at this joke bears some responsibility for pain it may have caused to assault survivors and for contributing to rape culture.

But is it necessary — or advisable — to turn against our desire to laugh, even as we shift our attention away from C.K. himself? A humor-positive feminist frame invites us to remember the other laughs that we have lost now that C.K. and his perpetrator-persona are not fully distinguishable. We can see that it was previously available as a relief joke that provocatively illustrated the kind of exceptionalism to which we are all capable of falling prey. And as an explicitly anti-sexist incongruity joke, about the tendency of oft-repeated prohibitions to become empty slogans, especially where endemic, shame-inducing patterns of sexual violence are concerned. Paradoxically, though C.K.’s long history of abuse has destroyed his credibility as a critic of the ineffectiveness of liberal platitudes, it also proves the urgent necessity of the kind of critique he was trying to offer.

In December 2017, as I write this, a humor-positive frame also allows us to turn C.K.’s lines into a dark feminist superiority joke that, instead of stressing our own pain and disappointment, capitalizes on the situational irony here. This once-celebrated self-exposer has been exposed as yet another man with a consent problem. That is, since his accusers bravely went public and Louis C.K. affirmed their reports, the coyness of the original lines may be unraveled through a revenge joke: like a deranged wooden puppet, the comedian punches up at himself much harder than he intends. Feminist humorist Jill Gutowitz effectively put this metajoke into circulation when she posted links to C.K. telling a variety of rape jokes over the years, including the one discussed here, below the Tweet: “Surprised about Louis CK? Here’s every time he told us, to our faces, that he was a creep.” Because righteousness isn’t my favorite flavor, I don’t find this new version of the joke as funny as the one I thought that C.K. was telling in 2009. But I do like knowing that it’s going around.

Danielle Bobker is associate professor in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is also co-organizer of a working group on Feminism and Controversial Humor.

The post Toward a Humor-Positive Feminism: Lessons from the Sex Wars appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Queer Voices Respond To Deferred Candidacy

After a two-month wait, just as World Barista Championships got underway, the Specialty Coffee Association rocked the coffee world with the announcement that three major world coffee competitions will remain in Dubai this year, despite the numerous protests of the US coffee community—especially those who are LGBTQIA+ or allies. As an amendment to their initial rollout, SCA officials added the new Deferred Candidacy Policy, which allows candidates to defer to another year if they cannot attend world competitions for reasons of safety, health, or unforeseeable circumstances, pending approval from WCE’s World Championships Committee.

Widely criticized in the queer coffee community, this decision and added policy have led many to reconsider their involvement with SCA. I talked with some of those who felt the deepest impact from this decision: queer coffee professionals who have invested their time, money, and energy in the SCA, its guilds, and its competitions. These are their voices.

James McCarthy, Espresso Technician, Counter Culture Coffee World Brewer’s Cup Champion, 4 years competing, 2 years organizing, 1 year volunteering, several years SCA member

The SCA’s deferred candidacy policy is shameful. First, they decided not to move next year’s event to a place where queer/trans people feel safer—a place where anti-queer/trans laws aren’t on the books. This policy doesn’t just put the onus on the competitor to out themselves, it effectively punishes them by making them wait until the championship is not held in a place that is dangerous to them. It equates being LGBTQI with having a death in the family—can we pause on that one? To this board—or, to the majority of this board, because this was voted as a majority vote—being queer/trans is equal to dealing with the tragedy of familial death?

If the year I won the US Brewer’s Cup, the competition was being held in a country that had anti-queer/trans laws on the books, I would have been very nervous to travel there, and I know that I would not have gone. I have an F on my driver’s license and my passport; both still have my old name on them. Travelling is always nerve-wracking for me, even within the US. I would not have travelled to a country where it was very likely that the fact that my gender presentation doesn’t match what it says on my ID could land me in jail. I also need to acknowledge that these laws, in practice, end up being used on trans women, GNC, and those queer folks on the feminine spectrum overwhelmingly more often than on masculine of center folks, and on people of color way more often than white people.

With this new policy, I would have to prove possible discrimination to a committee before getting my deferment approved. They get to pick the host city, and then it falls on the competitor to work around the limitations caused by mostly white, cisgender, straight, male board.

This isn’t just international: I know that there are places in the US where queer, trans, and people of color do not feel safe traveling for coffee events—would I have wanted to go compete in Durham, NC if the bathroom bill was still standing? I know that my class and whiteness protect me, but what about others who would feel less safe? Why should we have to prove to a committee of mostly cis, white, and male folks that our safety and comfort matters?

They should have reached out to their queer and trans members more, and really listened to us. There is a way to support the global coffee community without putting some of their members in danger or singling them out as other. I also hope that the white coffee community doesn’t demonize the people of these countries because of these laws—I’ve seen more than one comment calling these countries themselves “backward,” a word which has a lot of shitty colonialist history attached to it, and also classist and racist implications. As we stand against the SCA in our opposition to this policy, we need also to stand with the coffee people living in these countries with anti-queer/trans laws.

I don’t see any part of this policy as beneficial, and I plan on removing myself from all SCA activities until they prove they will support and protect their queer and trans members.

Christina Snyder, Roaster 2 years SCA and RGA member, 1 year competing, 1 year volunteering

In my brief time as a member of the SCA and RGA, I’ve witnessed the institutions of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia mirrored throughout the events and policies enacted by these organizations. I have chosen, often defiantly, to remain a member in hopes of creating visibility and amplifying the voices of marginalized community members. The news of the selection of Dubai for the world events not only forced me to withdraw from competition but ask if my efforts and the efforts of many brave others have been in vain.

The deferred candidacy policy is a direct act of oppression on the LGBT+ community. By forcing the work onto queer/trans individuals, the hierarchy of heterosexual, cis males is maintained. It is appalling to place the burden of proving one’s identity onto any queer/trans individual; it is inconceivable to ask this for the sake of their safety.

By continuing to hold the events in Dubai, the SCA Board of Directors has made clear that their priority lies in monetary investments rather than the welfare of its members. The outrage of the LGBT+ community is loud, it is justified, and it is an appeal to the heart. I am saddened that only the wallet has listened.

Sam Penix, Owner, Everyman Espresso 10 years SCA and BGA member, several years competing, judging, coaching

I had to read the statement several times because I just could not believe my eyes. The statement sent a painful shock wave of cognitive dissonance throughout my body. How do I reconcile the community that I myself have benefited from and fostered all these years with the condescending statement released last week? However polite the language, it’s clear that the action or lack thereof sends a message which I as a trans person received as, “The SCA is not willing to sacrifice financial gains to maintain safety for its LGBTQIA members.”

I would like to have seen a statement that was fully transparent and answers the questions I have surrounding the lead up to the decision to choose UAE as a location for the international coffee event. I would like to see a investigation into the members of the SCA who selected Dubai as a location. Were there bribes involved? What legal or financial obligations does the SCA have to the venue in UAE?

How dare the SCA tell me this is my problem; how naive and untrue. We the members of the SCA will not tolerate the hosting of events where SCA members cannot safely attend. I am the SCA, because without members there is no SCA.

I do acknowledge that there are many countries for various reasons that pose a conflict for members. There must be a policy in place to address this. It’s just clear that this location was not thought through and/or decision-makers were corrupted with cash incentives. I hope that the SCA reconsiders this position, cancels the event in Dubai, and launches an internal investigation to find out what the fuck is going on.

Everyman Espresso will not renew its membership with the SCA and BGA and is strongly considering withdrawing from the 2018 barista competition circuit. We await further clarification from the SCA in light of our community’s response to their decision.

Dani Goot, Head of Coffee Strategy, Bellwether Coffee 2 years on Roasters Guild Executive Council, 15 years RGA member, several years volunteering, 1 year competing

It’s hurtful for me to know that all the work I have done to be my true self still leaves me unsupported by the organization I have worked to develop. I have avoided working with the SCA years prior because of the ways patriarchy showed in the organization. Things appeared to shift and balance out a bit, so I ran for the Roasters Guild Executive Council and was voted in by the Roasters Guild members. I ended up resigning a few months ago and still feel very good about that decision due to my political views and personal ethics. This deferred candidacy policy has put the queer community back a few years from all the work we have done with breaking down gender inequality in coffee. I am asking for you to stand with the LGBTQIA folx that do not feel safe or included in any coffee events including and not limited organizations such as the SCA or WCE. We as a community need to support each other as a whole. If we can’t do that, it isn’t a community worth being a part of. Where do we go from here as queer people within the coffee community?

Jasper Wilde, Coffee Educator, Ritual Coffee Roasters 3 years BGA member, I year competing, wanted to compete or judge every year but could not afford to do so

I am devastated that the most influential coffee organization is choosing to view me and other queer people as non-essential. I am shocked that this decision was approved by their board of directors. I am particularly offended at the extreme sense of othering that the SCA is asking its members to subject themselves to. What is obscene is the need to gain permission by the Deferred Candidacy Policy. This is extremely harmful and repeats a long history of requiring queer, particularly trans people, to gain favor with the people oppressing them. This is respectability politics: the SCA wishes for us to out ourselves, come to them as gatekeepers, and prove our worth and vulnerabilities before we are given the honor of representing the country we are from. One action that I will take after this decision is to boycott the SCA. I will also be discussing with Ashley, my co-host of Boss Barista, if we wish to use our platform to help lead others to boycott. On a more broad level, this decision makes me question my future career in specialty coffee. I had once hoped that I would work at the SCA to advocate for worker rights as an industry leader but this decision has created a deep mistrust and I would never consider working with them on any level.

Bailey Arnold, Director of Education, Gregory’s Coffee 4 year SCA member, 1 year judging, 2018 preliminary winner, competing in 2018 qualifier

The idea that SCA is relying on competitors to be in the same work/life situation the following competition season is absurd. Confidence, morale, and support are all great contributors to performance, and this undoubtedly affects all three negatively. Even if someone is up to waiting around to compete at a location where they feel safer, what are the odds they’ll be as motivated, excited, or mentally prepared? It’s an automatic disadvantage on top of everything else.

As a first-time competitor unlikely to advance to an international level anytime soon, whose fees are already paid for NOLA, with the main motivation for competition to be able to coach a new competitor from my company in a subsequent competition season, I’m conflicted. If I were an independent competitor I would likely consider pulling out, not wanting to support competition until the SCA’s actions align with their stated policies. However, I’m not competing solely for myself, it’s for my company and ultimately for our less seasoned baristas (potentially of a less visible demographic, as around 3/4 of our company is made up of POC) to get more engaged and excited about working with coffee.

Additional points have been made that if currently signed-up competitors pull out, people who are waitlisted can/will sign up, which yields even more profit for the SCA. At the current time I plan to continue on the “road to competition,” while keeping in mind any action I can take while participating. I’m a huge proponent of visibility and I’m “out.” I live in New York City, my family is tolerant, I’m white, I’m cisgender, I’m buoyed by tons of support, and I have a pretty solid bill of mental health. I’m in a place of considerable privilege and willing to take on this emotional labor while participating, whatever that will look like in the moment.

Jenna Gotthelf, Barista, Everyman Espresso BGA member, 3 years competing, 2018 preliminary winner, competing in 2018 qualifier

The deferred candidacy policy lacks the same foresight as the initial decision to hold WCE competitions in Dubai. It is absurd to have to qualify and approve someone’s legitimate safety concern. It’s not right to force someone to come out like that. I don’t think it is a logical solution to the problem. Deferring for a year is not what competitions are about. It doesn’t work like that in sports. In the pursuit of championship, it is important to carry the momentum of a win into the next round expediently.

The best solution here is to turn back time and undo the decision to host in Dubai, but that is not an option. The SCA is a business. Dubai is a money country. From what I understand of the recent regional competition structural changes over the past few years, there is a budget issue. I image there is a huge financial investment here, and forfeiting completely would result in an astronomical loss. I am not saying this isn’t upsetting, but it is unrealistic to think that the SCA would pull out of Dubai completely.

I do not believe there is malice behind the SCA’s decision. They have stated that moving forward, infrastructural changes will be implemented to avoid something like this from happening again. The most important part of making mistakes is acknowledging and learning from them. The SCA made an egregious error that they have acknowledged, and will end up paying for in backlash of the community. I support my peers who will be boycotting the SCA and competitions moving forward. I will not be doing so. I don’t compete because I am gay. I compete because I want to win, and if safety is another hurdle then that is unfortunate, but if every member of the LGBTQ+ community abstains from participating in these events, who will rise?

Shannon, Operations Consultant 10 years on-off BGA, RGA, or SCA member, judge for the first time at 2018 preliminaries

This year was the first time I’d ever attended or judged a SCA event. Occasionally over the last 10 years I’ve held RGA or SCA membership, this year was my first as a BGA member. The SCA has never appealed to me; in the early days the amount of money it cost to be a member in exchange for the services received seemed preposterous. All marketing material featured white, middle-class heterosexual men and the occasional cis woman. I could not see myself in those faces. All they have had to offer was competition and high-cost educational classes. This decision is confirmation that the SCA is not for queer or low-income bodies. I will not renew my membership unless this decision is overturned.

Michelle Johnson, Barista Hustle 2 years SCA member, Level 1 SCA-certified barista, Barista Camp attendee, 1 year Expo attendee (including panel hosting and Symposium attendance), 1 year attending World of Coffee, 1 year attending WBC, consulted for SCA in Dublin on SCA’s strategic planning

When I first heard that there were going to be multiple coffee competitions in Dubai, I knew damn well I wasn’t going to go. As a Black woman who learned the hard way (sexism but more notably, racism) in Budapest, Hungary this year, the anxiety and extreme hyperawareness that comes with being who I am in certain countries—and honestly, international industry events, in general—isn’t worth it.

When I learn more about why Dubai was a problematic place to hold an event, through Sprudge and my own research, I felt that it just further pushed me and so many others away from being able to attend and support events like that. As someone who spent most of my coffee career as a barista from DC and Arizona, the idea of going to international industry events was always cool, and I felt they could help enrich my learning and expand my view of coffee on a global scale. But after attending several and the Dubai decision, I haven’t felt all that welcome.

The Deferred Candidacy Policy is just trash. Echoing what I just said, it just further boxes people out of those spaces. And I feel the most for nonbinary and trans people, especially those of color, where the opportunity to even be a part—as a competitor, supporter, general attendee, etc—isn’t even remotely available to them in Dubai. It’s also discouraging as fuck to just be pawned off to another year (if they’re a national competitor) and it’s harmful as hell to make people have to “justify” themselves through outing for being deferred in the first place. I think it’s fucked.

Having just moved continents, I’m definitely still in a transitional and recharging stage but I’m working to create more space for those more affected than I to voice their hurt and concern (mostly through the Barista Hustle Facebook group), amplifying and boosting events happening around the world, and the BH team has been talking a lot about what we can do, too.

Izi Aspera, Roaster, Wrecking Ball Coffee 4 years volunteering, SCA class attendee, 2 years competing, 3 years Expo attendee

The SCA’s decision to hold World events in Dubai and their deferred candidacy policy were superficial. As much as SCA has advertised their global reach, they often lack global awareness and how their investment in said region promotes complacency to the exploitation of migrant workers and violence towards the LGBTQIA locally and abroad. It made it clear that there is little hope for the LGBTQIA community to be represented on just allyship alone and the SCA must engage more in the communities they occupy for these events.

I already struggle every year to afford booking a flight, guarantee time off for the event, a place to stay, and a ticket to the annual convention and SCA classes. That being said it is very easy for me to back out of continuing to financially support the SCA going forward. There is no reason for me to continue to support an organization that finds my support expendable or value my contributions beyond their financial gain. If anything the SCA’s actions have made me realize how important it is to invest in local organizations that reflect my own core values.

Oodie Taliaferro, Barista, Cultivar Coffee Bar 3 years SCA member, 2 years attending Coffee Champs, 1 year Expo attendee, 2018 regional competitor, competing in qualifiers for 2018 cycle

I think that the Dubai decision was naive, frankly. For an organization that is home to so many different types of folx, it’s up to them to make sure that we can attend events, not only as competitors, but volunteers, judges, etc. I understand that the outrage is pretty American-centric, but each country’s own governance (former SCAA, SCAE, et al.) is responsible for their constituents, and this time, now that it’s affecting us, we have the opportunity to make change. If anything, this decision has given more opportunity for smaller community events to crop up, and that’s really neat.

I’m still competing. I’ll speak out when given the platform to do so. I’m working in the Dallas metroplex area and greater south central region to promote more inclusive, more progressive events and discussions more often.

Colleen Anunu, Director of Coffee Supply Chain at Fair Trade USA and Director for SCA 8 years volunteering, 2 years on RGEC, 3 years on SCA board, Vice Chair of Research

The deferred candidacy policy raised a lot of red flags for me and you can be sure that I voiced all of my concerns on multiple occasions and very loudly. I was, and still am, not in favor of the policy for a number of the discriminatory reasons that many people have already written about, as well as for more complex reasons related to my interpretation of my duty of loyalty as a governor of the association.

We owe the members of the association a lot of information, and I am committed to pushing for it without spin and without filter.

From the outset I have volunteered to take part in the Review Panel to ensure that the perspectives from my community of peers reached the desk of the President’s Council of the board. That task force had a discrete number of activities and timeline, but there is still so. much. work. to. do. in terms of ensuring that those voices are not only heard but are understood. We are stating from a 101 space where terms like “outing” and “passing” and the letter Q aren’t understood, let alone the dynamics at play in identity based discrimination. The numerous conversations that I have had with both the board as a whole and individual board members have shown mixed results. To be clear, there have been aha moments, so some of what I’m focused on now is getting those people to champion the work. I try to maintain accessibility and non-judgement for my colleagues to ask honest questions, but a strong position when my informed perspectives from lived experience are disregarded.

One of my main non-preassigned priorities on the board is to support the work being done on embedding concepts of inclusivity and diversity throughout the association: HR, guilds, events, and governance.This includes the policies and procedures for event selection, as well as guiding philosophies on governance, creating pathways to leadership for marginalized folks, and ensuring that staff and volunteer leaders are supported.

I have a personal mission to demystify the association: structure, strategy, governance, who to contact (and how amazing the staff are), and on and on and on. I want members to have access to their association leaders and to take full advantage of their rights and benefits. People can reach out to me at any time to talk.

RJ Joseph (@RJ_Sproseph) is a Sprudge staff writer, publisher of Queer Cup, and coffee professional based in the Bay Area. Read more RJ Joseph on Sprudge Media Network.

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