Glee: Furt

Fair warning: Satah’s review last week was much funnier than any of mine will ever be, and quite frankly, I don’t have a long review in me this week. I’m honestly not sure I’ll make it through the season, at this point, because the combination of just sheer badness and infuriating storylines is a little too much for me to handle. I can appreciate an artfully executed show even if I don’t like the stories, but Glee is a hot mess of conflicting stories, wildly seesawing tone, autotune, and dreadful acting. It’s a little much for me to handle.

This week on Glee: Uh, weddings and a whole lot of white nondisabled people. I thought shows didn’t do the wedding episode until they were running out of content in the third season. But I guess Glee was always precocious. I have to admit, I didn’t watch this week’s episode very closely because there were so many alluring distractions, like a sowbug crawling across the floor, deer in the pasture, paint drying, and grass growing.

But here’s what I did take away: There’s basically nothing schools can do about bullying, so if you are being bullied, the best option is to go to private school. If you cannot afford private school, that is simply too bad, so get ready to get bullied. Glee has really been riding the bullying wave here and so far I have been singularly unimpressed with what the show has to say about bullying and how to handle it, which seems to be summed up as ‘bullying sucks but you should just deal with it.’

No. Really. That’s what Glee told viewers this week. Meanwhile, Kurt’s friends tried to protect him by ‘manning up’ and confronting his bully in the locker room. Their efforts were unsuccessful. As Kurt points out, the only thing that would actually protect him is if the school established and enforced a no bullying policy, which is a pretty stark reminder of the responsibility of schools and districts: Bullying isn’t the responsibility of victims or their friends, it’s the responsibility of the people who are charged with keeping the school environment safe and functional for students. Surprisingly, Sue seemed ready to go to bat for Kurt, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the school board refused to uphold Sue’s disciplinary actions when she stood in as principal.

Glee points out the only rational approach to the bullying issue, but none of the characters actually pursue it. Kurt’s father, who has shown before that he’s willing to fight for his son, just rolls over and sends him to private school, rather than pushing the school to set up and enforce a no bullying policy? He talks about not knowing the school board and feeling disconnected from the members, which I get, but I’m pretty disappointed in him for not fighting for Kurt’s right to stay with his friends. If Glee wants to play the afterschool special game, it should at least do it right.

24 November, 2010 – 6:54 pm | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged |

Book Review: Fire, by Kristin Cashore

Please note that this review contains some mildly spoilery discussions of Fire, and if you have not read it yet, you may want to wait to read this. Don’t worry, the review isn’t going anywhere. (By ‘mildly spoilery’ I mean ‘on par with what you would find in a book review,’ not ‘major plot points are revealed and you will be unable to enjoy the book at all if you read this.’)

Fire was sent to me by Karen Healey, who reviewed it thusly:

BOOK: Feminism! War! Magic! Intrigue! Musings on the price of pretty privilege for women!
ME: This sounds even better than Graceling.
BOOK: Oh, it is.

Now, I confess, I haven’t read Graceling. This turned out not to be a problem with Fire, thankfully. The book stood well on its own and interested me enough to make me want to go back and read Cashore’s first book. This book takes place in the same world, but a different region, and while one character does have a Grace, it was pretty easy to follow and understand what was going on. So if you’re going ‘eh, I want to read this, but I don’t want to have to read another book first,’ it’s ok, go ahead and read Fire.

Fire revolves around the last living human monster. Monsters, in this setting, are supernatural creatures or people with unusual beauty and the ability to compel humans and animals to follow their orders; they can enter minds and mold responses, form memories, control people, and so forth. With special training, people can learn to resist them by closing their minds, although some people actively choose to open their minds to monsters because they find the experience pleasurable.

The title character of the book is feared and hated by the people around her. They remember the manipulative powers of her father and the problems he plunged the government into by controlling people. At the same time that people fear her, though, they are also compelled and attracted to her; her unusual beauty makes people want to be around her and want her body. It’s kind of an interesting conundrum for a character, to be too beautiful, and to struggle with being constantly desirable. People literally lose control around her, endangering her, and while this is often framed as flattering or a compliment in other settings, this book reminds us of the danger inherent in it.

It’s not that I think people in this world, our world, lose control around pretty people and can’t be held accountable for their actions. In Fire, the compulsions people experience and the attraction are supernatural in nature. And, as various characters demonstrate, even with the strong origins of the compulsion, it’s still possible to master it. Fire forces the King, for example, to learn to control his mind so he can control his behaviour around her. In fact, the book puts forward a strong personal accountability narrative. Fire is never allowed to blame herself for things that happen around her. Other characters aren’t afraid to say, ‘look, people losing control around you is their fault, not yours.’ So, yay, embedded feminist message.

The book of course includes a love story, which I found rather boring because, well, love stories bore me, as a general rule. Fortunately there was a lot of other fun stuff to keep me occupied, like tons of intrigue, and if you too are not that into love stories, I think you’ll still find something to like here. I also enjoyed the sexual openness of the society in Fire. Numerous characters, including members of the royal family, have children out of wedlock and it’s not stigmatised or commented on. Likewise, Fire’s exercise of bodily autonomy is not a topic of debate or discussion. This is a society that doesn’t shame women or men for being sexual as long as that sexuality is freely exchanged and everyone is having a good time.

Fire also managed to avoid falling into the trap I sometimes see with books where the lead character has ‘unearthly beauty’ and is supernatural, evidently infallible, and in constant need of protection. Fire makes mistakes. She struggles with herself. She admits those mistakes and talks about their costs, instead of eliding them or trying to erase them. Her supernatural powers come with costs and she’s deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being able to control minds. She struggles with ethical issues like using her powers in interrogation. And she’s not constantly relying on other characters to save her. She does a fair amount of saving herself, and she’s a mean hand with a bow. I like that in a character; what strikes me most about her is that she is interdependent with the people around her. She provides support and is supported. She stands on her own, but she doesn’t fall into the strong and silent warrior trap where she isn’t allowed humanity (monstranity?).

If you like fantasy and you like YA, I suspect you will probably enjoy Fire. The book has some great thematic elements and left me with some food for thought when it comes to issues like beauty, love, and attraction. And there was plenty of adventure and fun times to keep me on my toes, as well as some really awesome friendships between many different characters, including lots of friendships involving women, which I always love to see depicted in fiction. Cashore’s characters are dynamic, diverse, and interesting, and they manage to step beyond a lot of stereotypes that readers might be tempted to shove them into.

24 November, 2010 – 10:43 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reviews | Tagged , , |

Glowing Brains

Dominic Holden at Slog: Video Shows Seattle Cop Kicking 17-Year-Old Boy in the Groin Even Though His Hands Were Up; SPD Begins Misconduct Investigation; KIRO Says SPD Had Video for Some Time But Did Nothing

The youth reportedly fell to the floor and then the officer proceeded to kick him in the chest and face.

Ben Spurr at NOW Magazine: Unsafe at Bixi speed

While Bixi pushers like to hype the spontaneity available when bikes are on offer around town, the operation strikingly doesn’t provide helmets for last-minute cyclists.

Laura Burke at the Texas Observer: A Threat To Society

Cain knew forgoing prescription drugs in favor of marijuana in Texas was risky. But he didn’t realize how far local authorities would take their zero-tolerance drug policies. As he saw it, he was just a disabled guy.

Koe Eskenazi at SF Weekly: First Transgender Judge Victoria Kolakowski’s Long Road

She’s almost certainly the first transgender judge in American history, and even more almost certainly, the first elected transgender judge.

Robert Gammon at East Bay Express: Voters Did Understand Ranked Voting

So the voters must have been confused, right? It turns out, not so much.

24 November, 2010 – 9:12 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , |

Debt Culture Never Really Went Away

One consequence of the credit crunch was a reduction in available credit, and a tendency among pundits and the like to claim that the days of free and easy credit were over. That’s definitely true, to some extent, but in another sense, it’s not. Debt culture is very much alive and well and it seems like a number of lenders have not learned from their mistakes. Exploitative lending still flourishes, after a brief period of suppression. It’s almost like people think that making the same mistakes twice won’t result in exactly the same outcome.

I’ve really been struck by this recently when examining the crisis in college funding. College students are finding it harder and harder to afford college, with rising tuition/fees and grants not really keeping pace with college costs. Student loans are available, but they usually aren’t sufficient, and some students find loans out of reach, or are intimidated by the sheer volume of debt involved. I had to borrow a comparatively small amount to go to college, despite attending expensive schools, because I went in an era when there were more grants. If I was enrolling in college this year, being faced with the kind of financial aid packages being offered, I’m not sure I could afford to take on that level of debt.

Student loans aren’t the only debt taken on by students. At least student loans are, at least in theory, an investment. They come with very low interest and generous repayment terms. In an ideal world, the amount will start to seem pretty negligible as students work on paying it off. It’s hard at first to make payments right out of college with poor job opportunities, but over time, the seemingly insurmountable sum of the monthly payment starts to seem more reasonable. Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world. A lot of college graduates can’t get jobs at all, not even poor ones, and a lot of students are forced to take on so much debt that the payments really are impossible. And you can’t escape student loans. They will persist through bankruptcy and pretty much everything else, except in very rare circumstances.

Many students also find themselves deep in credit card debt. There are a number of reasons for this. Some students take on credit cards because it’s the only way to afford college. They can’t pay for books and other supplies without buying on credit. They also can’t repay their cards because they’re in school and struggling to make it as it is, so the debt mounts, and mounts, and they pay huge service charges. Other students enter college, are presented with a smörgåsbord of credit cards, and take up the offers right and left, treating them like free money.

It’s easy to get trapped that way if you have never managed your own finances or interacted with people who have. The money is abstract and has no meaning because you swipe a card and get things. Want, take, have, as it were. Then the bill comes due and everything changes, suddenly that money is very real, but it’s too late. The bills mount over the months, you keep buying ‘just little things’ and you end up very, very deep in debt to creditors who charge extremely high interest and get extremely aggressive, because they want your money.

Allegedly, one of the reforms proposed for the financial system was a crackdown on predatory lending practices. I’ve written about abusive and predatory lending before, but I didn’t spend a lot of time in that piece talking about college students. Credit card companies prey on college students, and I am really not exaggerating; when you have multiple tables for credit card applications right at orientation, it’s a big problem. Some students avoid them, others are familiar with credit cards and finances and can handle it, others have only ever thought about money in the abstract and they end up in deep trouble, cheered along by a smiling representative who says ‘sign here, you don’t really need to read that closely.’

Some colleges offer orientation workshops and classes to incoming students, covering financial issues. I attended a few when I started college and what I was struck by was the fact that people least likely to need those classes were the most likely to be in them. Most of my fellow students in those classes had had their own bank accounts for a long time, had established credit histories, had worked through high school, were very familiar with handling finances, with debt, and with using money wisely.

Meanwhile, I ran into students outside of class who had never had bank accounts before and whipped out an array of credit cards at every opportunity. I’m not interested in concerntrolling or lecturing people on how to live, so I rarely said anything, but I often wondered about the consequences of profligate spending and where these students would find themselves after graduation, with hundreds of dollars due on credit cards every month before the student loan payments even came due. It’s hard to dig yourself out of that hole, once you’re in it. You can work, endlessly, and pay down the cards, but meanwhile, you don’t have enough money to live on, so you keep using the cards. It’s hard to understand, before you fall in it, how deep that hole is.

A lot of people simplistically talk about austerity and how people ‘just have to spend less’ but it’s not always that simple. It’s not always possible to cut your spending down. If you’re already living on the bare minimum, perhaps already receiving government assistance, where exactly are you supposed to cut? How are you supposed to get ahead when even a tiny unexpected expense throws everything off? You have to repair the car because you can’t get to work otherwise, you have to go to the doctor’s for pneumonia, you have to take time off for whatever reason, and you’re trapped in an endless cycle that’s impossible to escape.

I worry about our college students who have been victimised by predatory lending and their ability to survive after college in this grim economy, I really do.

23 November, 2010 – 10:44 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , |

Gracious Kerning

Lynn Comella at Las Vegas Weekly: Sex research is alive and going well, even if the actual sex isn’t

Personal curiosity aside, the results also have important implications for medical and public health professionals who are on the front lines in addressing issues related to sexually transmitted infections, HIV prevention and unplanned pregnancies.

James Pitkin at Willamette Week: The Longest Odds

But while the Wood Village guys made a poor case to add more gambling to the state, here’s the untold story about tribal gambling in Oregon: By several key measures, American Indians here are no better off than they were the day the casinos first opened in the mid-1990s.

Brendan Kiley at The Portland Mercury: Inside the Cocaine Kingdom

Diego is not his real name, and he’s currently living in a different Latin American country—otherwise, he said, he wouldn’t be talking to me.

Bruce Wark at The Coast: The poverty machine

“The working poor are poor in part because their income cannot keep ahead of their expenses—and in part because the fragility of their finances shackles them to debt,” Richardson wrote in his ruling. “Their lives are full of stories of cases where debt has become a form of indentured servitude from which they cannot escape.”

Heidi Walters at the North Coast Journal: Drive Our Cars

Why does Lieutenant Steve Knight, who lives in Eureka and is in charge of the animal shelter, need an overnight vehicle, especially when he’d reported on his request form that he only had about three after-hours call-outs in 2008-2009? Does he get an overnight car, wondered Elsebusch, simply because he’s a high-ranker, a lieutenant?

23 November, 2010 – 9:22 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

Waste In My Face

Growing up, we relied on a collection tank filled with rainwater for all our water needs. The tank held 1,000 gallons, and when they were gone, they were gone. This instilled in me a rather fervent sense of urgency when it came to water conservation; I took sparse showers, was careful washing dishes, didn’t flush the toilet every thirty seconds, and so forth. We also relied on a septic tank for processing solid waste, which tended to make me more aware of what could go down the toilet and what couldn’t.

Then I went to college, where I was on municipal water and sewer, and every house I’ve lived in since then was also in town. I sort of…forgot what it was like to be on a well, to have a septic tank. Until I moved to the new house. My landlords are very water conscious and their well has never run dry specifically because they are careful about water usage, and since we share a well, I have to be especially careful, thinking not just about the water needs of my household, but also theirs; no watering the garden at whim, in other words. My septic is separate, but, again, my sense of awareness has had to shift because being on a septic tank is not at all like being on municipal water and sewer.

For a lot of people, these concepts are abstract; a lot of folks don’t even know what a septic tank is, really, or how it works. It’s definitely been a little weird getting back into the groove of thinking about how to be more conscientious and careful; using less toilet paper, only flushing toilet paper and whatever comes out of my body, being more careful about showers. I’ve always been fairly water conscious by nature but I’m especially so now, because I’m reminded of how important it is; this isn’t like town, where the flow of water only stops if someone doesn’t pay the water bill. If the well runs dry, it’s a huge problem and a potentially very expensive one.

It makes me think about all the conservation measures environmental publications tout like they are new and amazing, when people have been practicing them for years out of necessity. I still remember my shock in college when I saw that the shower didn’t have a toggle to turn the water off while you were in the shower. You had to turn the water off at the taps, and then adjust the taps again when you needed water to rinse off. I mentioned this bizarre design to another student, and she looked at me like I had grown a third head. ‘Why would you want to turn the water off while you were in the shower,’ she asked.

There are other things about living out of town that are different, although they used to be routine for me. We don’t get garbage service here, which means that if I need to throw something away, I have to take it to the dump and confront the landfill, up close and personal. Compost was the first thing I installed, because there is no way in heck I am paying to throw food waste away, and I want compost for the garden, spring’s big project. But it also makes me more careful about every single thing I bring home, because someone isn’t going to come by and take it away for me. Likewise with recycling, which I have to drop off at the transfer station on my way into town.

These aren’t bad things, at all, it just requires being more aware of what I’m doing. And it requires things like, yes, securing a garbage can because there are raccoons and I do not want to wake up to garbage and recycling strewn across the yard. I’m more inclined to reuse things, to figure out ways to repurpose things, to avoid having to throw things away. My consciousness has shifted in response to my surroundings.

In town, and in the City, I was very much disconnected from my own waste. I understood it on an abstract level as a thing that was a problem, as a thing I wanted to cut down on, but here, it’s immediate. If I throw something away, I’m the one who has to deal with it. If I fail to rinse out cans properly or to tie up the recycling right, I’m the one who will be left with moldering pumpkin puree or whatever smeared across myself and my car. I have to think more about everything that I do.

Several cities, including San Francisco, are working on zero waste initiatives right now. I admire the effort but I think it’s going to be fundamentally challenging because a lot of people have never lived with their waste, in a sense. People who have lived in San Francisco their whole lives have never had to load up their cars for a trip to the dump, just for example. It’s hard to understand the impact of your waste until you are accountable on a very personal level for every scrap of it; if I fill the septic tank sooner than expected or clog the line by flushing something I shouldn’t have, I’m the one who gets to deal with it, I’m the one who has to contact the landlords and shamefacedly ‘fess up and have the septic company or the plumber come out and deal with it.

Having my waste in my face is a good thing, I think. It’s forcing me to cut down on the waste part, and to realise how careless I was getting when I lived in town.

22 November, 2010 – 10:30 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , , |

Uncomfortable Leeches

Tim Vanderpool at Tucson Weekly: Your Tax Dollars at Work

And so it was not until federal agents spilled out of their vehicles in a flurry of firepower and black windbreakers that the assorted denizens of Sixth Avenue started to take notice.

T. Ballard Lesemann at Charleston City Paper: Craft brewers appear spared in Four Loko crackdown

It seemed like a few bad apples might spoil things for hundreds of microbreweries who use chocolate, coffee, and tea as ingredients in specialty ales and lagers.

David S. Bernstein at The Boston Phoenix: Minority Blues

But the midterms nevertheless transformed the Bay State’s congressional delegation. In one fell swoop, the group went from one of the nation’s most powerful and influential delegations, to one of the most irrelevant.

Scott Henry at Creative Loafing: ‘Burbs or bust

The transformation became symbolically complete this April, when the paper moved its newsroom and offices out of downtown Atlanta (its home for more than 130 years) and relocated to a six-story office building in Dunwoody across the street from Perimeter Mall — a solid 15 miles away and smack-dab in the middle of the most affluent of OTP communities.

Laura Paskus at Santa Fe Reporter: Fly Over Home

Even on the fringes of Albuquerque, aircraft flying in and out of Kirtland Air Force Base startle pets and young children—and remind everyone that, despite the moniker of “enchantment,” New Mexico is, first and foremost, a military state.

22 November, 2010 – 9:16 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , |

Shame! At the Dinner Table

Treehugger ran a feature last month on what they called ‘cheatatarianism,’ the phenomenon of claiming to be vegetarian at home and then eating animal products outside the home. The article sent my brain spinning off in some different directions. The idea of lying about your diet at home seems odd, to me, but given how pompous people can be about their diets, and how determined people can be to shame each other, I can see how some folks might find it easier to lie at home to keep the peace.

I don’t want to get into a debate about which diet is ‘better’ because that’s old, tired ground. I think that everyone needs to eat food that tastes good, that makes them feel good, that makes them feel happy, and that people should have access to food that meets that goal. For me, a major concern with the food system is lack of access. I’m not interested in policing what people do/don’t eat, and as an ex-vegan, you won’t catch me sanctimoniously lecturing about the ‘benefits’ of one diet or another. I’m interested in food access and making food choices available to everyone, to support people eating food they like.

And while shaming is a common tactic in a lot of movements, I think it’s especially common in the environmental movement in general and the food movement in particular. People are constantly and consistently shamed for not eating the ‘right’ things, often by people who don’t really think about the complexities involved with food and eating. There are significant barriers to accessing vegetarian food, organic food, locally produced food and those barriers don’t go away by shaming people. They go away by changing the food system.

For some people who are considering veganism or vegetarianism, they want to move in small steps, and cutting out animal products at home is easier for them. People who think the diet has benefits, and aren’t avoiding animal products simply because they don’t like them or because they believe they are ethically/morally wrong, might not be willing to go whole hog in one go, but do want to cut down on the consumption of animal products on the argument that eating less of these products is better than continuing with their previous dietary habits. Using animal products as a treat, rather than a regular occurrence, may help them stick to their desire to eat less animal products by allowing them to eat some. There’s a phenomenon that happens where humans pledge to do things, slip up, and then just give up, and building in some room for error helps people keep their initial pledges.

Many of the environmental arguments are based on the idea that reducing use of animal products will be a more efficient use of resources, which is both true and false, because the issue is complicated, but no matter how you slice it, less demand for animal products would cut down on things like CAFOs. Heck, Treehugger itself even has a ‘weekday vegetarian’ feature, providing recipes people can prepare at home with the goal of cutting down their consumption of animal products, not necessarily stopping it entirely. It seems like rather than shaming people for being partially vegetarian, so to speak, we should be supporting people who are making modifications to their diet within their comfort zones?

Dietary choices are personal, and they are complicated. Things easy for one person might be hard for another. Deriding people for the way they choose to eat is not really the best way to convince them to change their habits or to support them in the process of trying to make dietary changes. People who genuinely believe that vegetarian and vegan diets are better for everyone, not just for them, might want to consider ways of making those diets more accessible and friendly to a variety of people, and definitely shouldn’t be slagging on people who have trouble sticking to a vegan or vegetarian diet.

How often do I hear (and did I say, in my militant days) ‘saying ‘meat just tastes too good’ is no excuse,’ for example? This positions such diets as a matter of willpower; if you just try harder to be a better person, you can be vegan or vegetarian! While this neatly ignores the many entangled social and class issues (cost and availability of food vary depending on where you live and who you are), it also neatly cuts out people who may, actually, legitimately, need to eat meat. People with disabilities or chronic illnesses who have trouble getting themselves to eat, for example; I myself have been having extreme difficulty feeding myself lately, and when I get hungry for something, I eat it, period, no matter what it is, because I am not eating enough and I’ll take any source of calories my body can tolerate. This week, that might be hummus and pita bread. Next week, it might be salami sandwiches. To tell me I just need to ‘try harder’ ignores the fact that I could actually starve myself to death by eating a restrictive diet. I can’t force myself to eat food my body is rejecting.

Being lectured and provided with ‘helpful suggestions’ doesn’t really help people who may be balancing food allergies, fatigue, appetite problems, and other disability issues. Being told you just need to try harder is a constant refrain leveled against people with disabilities, and it is so very not helpful. Two people with the same disabilities may eat completely different diets, but it’s not because one is better than the other or is trying harder. Being told to ‘try harder’ doesn’t help when you have no local store with fresh produce, when you are allergic to soy and nuts and have trouble finding proteins, when you are trying to feed young children with particular eating habits, when you are working several jobs and you don’t really have time to research new recipes and cooking techniques.

One problem I see over and over again in discussions about food politics is the overlaying of personal experiences onto everyone else. ‘I can do it and you can too’ presupposes that everyone is identical, that everyone has the same access and the same abilities, and that’s simply not how it works. Shaming people for not being like you is not a very effective way to bring them round to your way of thinking.

21 November, 2010 – 10:32 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in Food | Tagged , , , |

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today marks the International Transgender Day of Remembance, to remember those who have been lost to transphobia, cissexism, transmisogyny, and intersecting bigotries like hatred of trans sex workers and trans women of colour. It is not the only day that people can remember those lives, but it is a day, and it is an opportunity for a global conversation.

There are lots of things I could talk about today, and I struggle to know what to say because it is an intensely personal day for me and many of the trans people who are writing, speaking, holding vigils, and engaging in other remembrance activities today. But what I would like to talk to you about today, what I think is important to talk about, is bullying. Recently, the airwaves have been abuzz with discussions about bullying and abuse of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth, but I haven’t seen very much discussion about the transgender community, outside of spaces specifically dedicated to us.

While people all over the world, of all genders and sexual orientations, participate in ‘awareness’ campaigns designed to spark discussion about bullying of gay youth and how to fight it, the trans community has been ignored. It’s virtually impossible to even find news reports specifically on trans youth who have been bullied to death, even though some studies estimate our rate of suicide attempts at 50%. And very few of these bullying awareness campaigns have talked about bullied trans youth, except, again, when they come specifically from transgender people, in transgender-friendly spaces.

Writing at Questioning Transphobia last month, Lisa said:

I don’t mean to introduce these statistics to say anyone has it harder, but rather to question why with all the talk about bullying and getting better, why what trans people specifically face is not discussed at all. I mean 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide? As compared to the 1.6% of the general population? I remember when people questioned the idea that trans people really had a 50% rate of attempted suicide, but it looks like that is confirmed. This is, honestly, reprehensible that this is constantly kept invisible, in the background. And it’s not as if trans people are a such a small minority, either. Educated guesswork puts us at .2-.4% of the population, with numbers supported in multiple countries, not even counting non-transitioning trans people that were neglected by Lynn Conway’s paper. In the US that means out of 310,430,000 people (per Wikipedia). 620,000 – 1,240,000 trans people. Relatively small compared to the rest of the population, but still significant. Not that population size should reflect anyone’s worthiness to not be bullied, harassed, denied employment, denied housing, and so on.

I think today, as I do every day, about my fellow transgender people who didn’t make it through the year, for a wide variety of reasons. The people who died because they could not access health services, ranging from trans women denied care at women’s clinics to trans men dying of conditions they weren’t screened for because of cissexist assumptions about bodies, to trans people who couldn’t meet the exacting standards for medical transition and decided they didn’t want to live anymore. I think about the people who were raped and beaten and murdered in the last year for their gender, their misgendering in the media and the decision on the part of some journalists to violate their memories by using the wrong names, employing the wrong pronouns, suggesting they deserved that happened to them.

And I think about all of the bullied trans people, not just trans youth, but trans people of all ages, who died in the last year, who came close to dying, who will die this year. I think about the tidal wave of hatred for us and the way it expresses and the fact that it is so rarely discussed. I think, too, about the bullying within the transgender community, the binarism, for example, that leads to people making assumptions about my body and causes people to think it’s perfectly appropriate to misgender me and people like me. I think about the ways to address the problems both outside and inside the trans community, to make the world a safer place for every person, of every gender (and nongender). I think about how we can possibly build a better world.

I think about how trans women of all ages are often excluded from ‘woman-only’ spaces or are made to feel unsafe in those spaces, and what kind of impact that has when you need help and solidarity. This is a form of bullying; telling people they don’t belong in your little club is a tactic I remember well from middle school. Telling people they can’t come to you for help is a form of isolation, a common abuse tactic. Making sure that people know exactly how much you despise them, and their bodies, is not just a form of power and control, it’s also bullying.

People die not just because they are bullied, but because they end up with nowhere safe and no person to turn to. For members of the trans community, finding safe spaces is difficult, and a space seemingly safe can turn unsafe very quickly.

Our exclusion from the conversation about bullying is reflective of our exclusion from other spaces in society, including spaces supposedly designed for us; how many ‘LGBQT’ centres forget completely about the ‘T’ and focus on the LGBQ, doing nothing to provide services to us? It’s not I think that the trans community is more important than the LGBQ community or that I think we deserve more or that I think being LGBQ is a bed of roses: All I want is to break down the walls between us.

I want non-trans people to talk about how bullying affects the trans community. I want video campaigns focused on bullying of trans people. I want more studies on suicidal ideation in the trans community, with a particular focus on intersections like social class, race, and occupation. I want a focus on creating safe and welcoming spaces for trans people to receive counseling, health care services, assistance. I want inclusive spaces for trans people to meet, to talk, to organise, I want trans teens in high school to have access to support. I want the world to stop paying lip service and saying that we matter, and to start doing something to back that claim up.

20 November, 2010 – 10:57 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , |

Social Justice Matters: Who Watches the Watchers?

One of the most appalling depredations and abuses in the United States prison system is the violence inflicted on prisoners by prison guards and other prison officials. It is systemic, it is often racially motivated, it is horrific, and it can be deadly. Prison guarding is often presented as a dangerous occupation fraught with potential hazards, but what a lot of people don’t talk about is the fact that it’s more dangerous for the prisoners than the guards.

As the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated, it does not take much to turn ordinary human beings into monsters. Putting on a guard’s uniform, being handed tools like pepperspray and night sticks, being given the keys to the lives of others, seems to be all it takes to push some people into inhabiting a space I can’t even imagine in my worst nightmares. We’ve seen the photographs from Abu Ghraib, we’ve seen the abuses at Guantanamo, but what about the things that happen on US soil, in US prisons, every day?

Prison guards have complete control over the prisoners in their blocks. They decide when people are allowed to leave their cells, to eat, to exercise. They decide when people get medical care. They are given broad latitude in their work because the people they work with are deemed ‘dangerous’ and, more importantly, because society has collectively indicated that it doesn’t care about the welfare of people in prisons. Human rights are not deemed important for the prison population, which is why you end up with endlessly repeated stories about abuses in US prisons, so many that sometimes I think I’m reading a story over again by accident, but I realise the name of the state is different or the number of guards have changed or the prisoners are a different gender.

Physical abuse, including head wounds so severe that surgical stapling was required to close them. Sexual abuse. Rapes committed by prison guards are often not reported because of a culture of intimidation and abuse. You cannot report a rape when your rapist controls your ability to move around, to eat, to see the outside world. You cannot report a rape when you live in full awareness that your rapist controls your access to medical treatment.

Prisoners are severely beaten for burping. For looking at a guard the wrong way. For not looking at a guard. For failing to respond to questions they don’t hear. For existing. For talking to other prisoners. For chewing too loudly. Prison guards can engage in things like rampant taser abuse and cover it up on the grounds that prisoners were posing a threat to others, or that there were safety concerns. To be a prison guard is to have a blank cheque, essentially, since no one will check up on what you do.

It’s difficult for prisoners to report abuse. While prisons do have medical personnel who should theoretically be able to identify signs of abuse like cuts, bruises, broken limbs, missing teeth, access to those people is controlled by the guards. While prisoners can contact the outside world, contact is monitored and redacted at will by the prison. While people can visit prisoners, visits are also carefully watched. People who attempt to report abuse in prisons will have no access to evidentiary support, and it’s impossible to bring suit without anything to prove the case.

Social justice organisations working in prisons attempt to document abuse where and when they spot it, and to bring cases to court, when possible. Sometimes, prison guards do the documenting for us; earlier this year, prison guards were suspended for proudly posting comments about prisoner abuse on Facebook (sound familiar?). Yet, the focus of the case was on ‘inappropriate Internet postings.’ Not the fact that guards were talking about bashing prisoner’s heads into the ground, but the fact that they thought it would be good to write about it, to provide documentation on what they were doing in their workplaces.

Again, we are told that people are imprisoned ‘for safety’ and that people need to be locked up in the interests of the common good. Yet, we cannot protect the people we are imprisoning from abuse, from violence, from death. We say that we fear rape, violence, murder from prisoners, yet we don’t think they deserve the right to live without rape, violence, and murder themselves, evidently. We don’t think that prisoners deserve human rights, that atrocities committed in prisons are a problem; the bigger problem is hearing about them, not that they happen.

Who watches the watchers? The culture of prison guarding is such that even guards attempting to behave ethically, inasmuch as restricting freedom of movement and association for fellow human beings is ‘ethical,’ are pressured by the culture. They are encouraged not to report. People who do choose to follow up on abuse, to discuss issues with the warden, will be victims of workplace harassment and abuse. Prison guards claim that they need to be tight-knit to protect each other, to watch each other’s backs, to provide support during emergencies. Those same tight connections make it impossible to challenge the cultural values of the prison environment, to become a whistleblower.

Prison guards dehumanise prisoners to distance themselves from what they do and to justify it to themselves and to each other. Violence is ‘discipline,’ abuse is ‘necessary for safety,’ leaving prisoners to die is ‘not enough staff to safely transport the prisoner,’ rape is…I don’t even know what rape is. I don’t want to know.

Prisoners are members of the public too. Surely they deserve the same protections from abuse, sexual violence, and physical harm that we believe it’s important to extend to people who are not in prison.

19 November, 2010 – 10:43 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , , |