So Long Aunty Kate

So Kate Bornstein favourited tweets that were directly attacking me using blatant lies because they supported her "Tranny is okay to say and you all need to chill" narrative. 

That was the final straw to do what I should have done years ago; Excize her from my life. I've been putting it off for the longest time because of her cancer. I didn't want to be the girl who "abandons a friend over a philisophical disagreement". I wanted to be a supportive friend while she fought cancer regardless of how vehemtly I disagreed with her "Tranny" apologism.

But the EwPaul fallout has shown me that you can't be the nice girl when your friends are actively shooting your legs out from under you. Kate still, even through her cancer battle, actively promotes myths, mlies and utter bullshit to defend the use of the word tranny and is frankly condescending and dismissive of anyone who disagrees. Had she been ANYONE else that wasn't a friend I'd have blocked her for that shit YEARS ago.
But when a cis gay male drag queen started concern trolling me oin Twitter over my tweets to Kate imploring her to look at the harm she causes by pimping the word, expressing sympathy for my being hospitalized by a trans bashing but STILL insisting the word was positive despite how my bashers used it, who then started accusing me of "erasing Drag Culture" and somehow bashing Genderqueers and black gay people despite my ONLY ever having talked about the word tranny being a hate word and literally NONE of the shit he started pulling out of his ass, Kate Bornstein, my supposed friend, the woman who rode me like a racehorse to start writing an autobiography because she felt my writing was charming and intelligent and needed to be shared with the world, favourited three tweets where this man was directly personally ad-hominem attacking me because they pimped Kate's "Drag Invented Tranny so Tranny is Okay To Say" meme.

And that was when I realized. Sometimes you CAN'T be the nice girl.

Kate HAVING cancer was not a good enough reason for me to turn a blind eye and overlook her BEING a cancer to trans women. However much I care about her as a person and friend, she clearly cares more about pimping her Tranny narrative than about her friends. She saw me being attacked and she CHEERED THE ATTACKER. Because the attacker supported her narrative and I did not.

And I can no longer blind myself to the cancer of Kate Bornstein's beliefs, and I had to excise it. And so I did.

Dealing With Classic Derailing When Teaching About Trans Lives

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

For the past two weeks I've been all over the damned net trying to maintain my temper while dealing with a very depressingly high concentration of white middle to upper class gay men posting comments on various websites in reply to articles or blogs about the SNL Estro-Maxx sketch or the Craig Ferguson "My long lost half sister Peg" sketch. There are reasons so many trans folk are losing faith and trust in a large chunk of the gay community, feeling like we're conveniant tools to help fight their pet causes but to be discarded or thrown under a bus when WE need them. Honestly I actually have less issues with femisogynist lesbians bashing us the last two weeks than with smug dismissive gay men.

The general consencus among these white Gay en is that we in the trans community should just lighten the fuck up because these two skits were all in good fun, just harmless jokes doncha know? We're just too damn oversensitive, we need to lighten up and grow a funnybone.

Yadda yadda yadda.

I've cited Derailing for Dummies so many times the past two weeks I almost have the whole bloody thing memorized.

So I'm going to paste a couple things here. The comment of mine that got the most likes on Disqus and got the most people saying "Okay maybe you're right" of the hundreds I've posted the past two weeks, and the classic derail attempt it was in reply to.

The Derail attempt. (After I'd been pushed to start cussing in frustration at the bullshit lengths these guys were going to to avoid admitting the harm being done. 500 points if you can spot the classic derail attempt).

"It's really too bad that you can't keep a civil tone and refrain from the profanity (and that goes for everyone)--it would really give more credence to your arguments. That said...do you happen to notice that "Peg" seems pretty happy with herself? So, if you're taking the leap to casting her as transgender, she's out and proud. But I agree with the previous posters who equate this to Milton Berle, Flip Wilson and I'll add Jonathan Winters and all the Kids in the Hall and Catherine Tate (look them up). The comic conceit of "obvious bad drag" does not a transgendered character make. So before you cast stones at CBS and Craig Ferguson, consider what you're really criticizing. (In this case, it's simply a monotonous skit."

And my reply, the one which got the most Disqus likes and got through to people.

"Nope, sorry, but you're just classic derailing again to be able to dismiss me so you don't have to acknowledge you're completely wrong. Using a tone argument, "You're being too angry/hostile/profane therefore nothing you say is of any import" is classic derailing done by privileged idiots who don't want to have to expand their worldview to include the lives of marginalized people. This is how you convince yourself you'e better than me and therefore your inherant superiority automatically disempowers my justified rage in your mind, and you can dismiss me as overreacting.

So the only one losing ANY credibility here is YOU. Especially given the examples you cite, which back up NOT your arguments but mine. Earlier you argued that men wearing women's clothing didn't automaticaly equate to trans bashing. I agreed but argued that in the case of the SNL sketch and the Ferguson sketch it did because gender variance was the sole and only point of the "joke" in these cases. By citing comedians like Berle, Wilson, KITH and Winters, you're only strengthening MY argument, because NONE of those comedians were playing gender itself as the joke. They were all always portraying actual women when they crossdressed for comedy. Flip Wilson's Geraldine for example was NEVER played for "Man in a dress" laughs, she was played for "Angry black mother" laughs. The character was a straight-on woman, and the jokes were rooted on her attitude, NOT her bodyparts.

SNL and Ferguson cannot say the same. The entire point of both sketches was to mock gender variance, and you CANNOT argue it away or deny it in Craig's case just because the guy playing Peg has come out before as male characters and tried to disgust the audience.

Both sketches relied on negative demeaning stereotypes of trans women to get their laughs. Both mocked trans women as silly freakish people who are just weird and abnormal and there to be mocked or treated like sexual deviants. Both used facial hair to emphasize the whole "This is just a man in a dress" meme.

So sorry asshole, but your derailing attempts have failed and so has your lameass privilege based argument. And my very justified anger, amplified by your staggeringly self-absorbed ignorant arrogance, does not dilute the fact that I am RIGHT, you are WRONG, your privilege has made you ignorant of what trans people have to truly put up with, the damage shit like this does us, and the damage YOU do by perpetuating it rather than educating.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. YOU are not trans, so YOU do NOT get to tell US what is or is not offensive to us."

I wish it didn't take me being pushed to the limits of my already pain-reduced patience to drive me to a point where I can articulate myself enough to actually get the fuck THROUGH to people, but sometimes anger can be a good tool if you find the right lens through which to focus it.

I just wish I could've gotten through to more people. The bulk of those I've been dealing with still think we're all just uptight humorless trannies who need to take a joke.

But if SNL or Craig had done a sketch with a white guy in blackface singing Mammy, or a guy playing a hyper effeminate gay man looking for 10 year old boys to show his "lollypop" to, these assholes would be first in line out for blood demanding SNL/Ferguson apologize for the bigotry and that they remove the offending sketch.

But hey, we're just silly trannies, we just need to learn to take a joke. Right?

Wrong.

And I don't care who I piss off by having the nerve to stand up for myself and my sisters. Our lives are NOT material for bad comedy.

Feeling a Little Hopeful At Last

Crossposted on Pam's House Blend

Before I begin, please read these older blogs I wrote in January for some background on my ongoing legal drama.

Consider Me Reminded
Giving Up Is Sometimes Survival

Now, after I had written both of those, I found out at my preliminary hearing I was in fact by LAW in Canada, NOT allowed to enter a Guilty plea if I did not believe I was in any way guilty of the crime I was charged with. After telling the Duty Counsel and the Justice Of The Peace my story and why I was pleading guilty, they informed me that by admitting that I did not feel I actually WAS guilty they refused to accept my plea. They understood why I wanted to, but assured me that Jail Time was NEVER a likely sentence for a minor shoplifting offense and that it would be tantamount to lying under oath. In tears I plead Not Guilty at the reccommendation of a judge and an agent of the crown whose job it was to prosecute criminals.

So yesterday, August 19th, was my trial date. I was apprehensive. My treatment at the Port Coquitlam court in January had not left me feeling terribly reassured in the fairness of the Legal System, and I had still been unable to re-locate my witnesses from the Safeway Parking lot.

And then the Judge called me Miss. He made it a point to clarify with me what titles and pronouns were appropriate for me, and on the rare occasion he fucked up a pronoun he caught himself and immediately apologised. While he did at times seem a little condescending in his need to explain every single procedure to me, he was otherwise bending over backwards to be accepting and supportive.

That alone gave me hope. But that's not all.

Only one of the security gaurds involved in the original incident in June of 09 showed up. The one who made the transphobic statements didn't attend, and the one who did had gone out of his way to exclude any mention of him from his official report.

And the gentleman who DID show up stumbled badly. He had trouble remembering details without his notes. He fumbled badly at EVERY turn. And I caught him in BLATANT lies that even the Judge scolded him for. Among the biggest lies was, when asked by the crown about my emotional state, he claimed I was neither emotional nor upset nor crying, but he felt I was angry and wanted to hurt him.

There was just one problem with that claim. And when it came time for me to cross-examine him with my own questions, (I can't afford a lawyer nor do petty shoplifting offenses qualify for legal aid), I nailed him with his own evidence.



This is the photo the LPO took the day of the false arrest. It was submitted into evidence months before the trial. Holding my copy of it, I asked Iyer, the LPO, to confirm his contention that I was neither crying nor emotional but simply angry I'd been "caught". He stuck to his story.

So I asked the Judge to look at my eyes in the photo and tell me what he saw.



The Judge said he saw, as this close-up shows, "Red puffy eyes, clear evidence of recent or current crying, and tears visible on my cheek. As it's a scan of a photocopy of a print-out the tears may not be fully visible here, but the Judge saw them clearly enough on his copy.

When the Judge asked him to explain why his own photographic evidence contradicted his memory of events, Iyer was at a loss, and hung his head mumbling a vague excuse about not remembering.

The trial ran long and the Court neared closing time, so I unfortunately had to have an adjournment until October, the earliest possible date in which the Crown Prosecutor could be free to resume trying my case. So sadly the ordeal isn't over yet.

However while I'm not going to jinx anything by saying this might be a slam-dunk, I AM very hopeful right now for a number of reasons.

- Iyer was caught in enough inconsistancies and outright lies that even the Judge scolded him.

- Despite my best efforts to maintain my composure while explaining my juvey rapes to the court as my reason for going out of my way to NOT break the law as I would rather die than go through that ever again, the Judge could see the tears and emotion I was fighting to NOT show and expressed sensitivity and understanding to it.

- The Crown, whose job it is to prosecute and convict me, when going over the adjournment with me and asking me about my dumpster-diving for restaurant leftovers, expressed far more concern about whether there were aid resources I could look into to survive better than garbage food than about any details of the case.

Get that last one folks? The GUY WHOSE JOB IT IS TO CONVICT ME was more concerned about my health and living situation than about discussing the actual trial.

As I said, I won't jinx anything by garaunteeing an outcome, but I feel very hopeful right now. Things SEEM to be leaning in my favour. And it gives me hope that there are places in the legal system where a trans/is woman like me can and will be respected, treated kindly, and taken seriously.

And hope is a very wonderful feeling. And I feel it so rarely that I need to share it. I hope that the hope I'm feeling right now might creep into the hearts of all my Trans Sisters and brothers. Hope that sometimes, people in Authority ARE capable of accepting and respecting us, and sometimes, just sometimes, the truth actually matters when it comes to our lives.

I'd rather share hope than misery. So the buffet is open brothers and sisters! Help yourselves! And wish me luck come October that this thing will finally end and I can move on with my life.