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6 Responses to “Remember.”

1. Jim2 says:

   November 21, 2008 at 12:17 pm

   Bless you for doing this, Violet. Bless you.
2. violet says:

   November 21, 2008 at 12:32 pm

   Last night, as I was looking up these stories, I started crying.

   Not just because I kept finding the same story over and over again: a trans woman of color, probably poor, possibly a sex worker, is involved with a man (sometimes a stranger, more often not), who one day decides to beat her to death.

   Over and over and over.

   I could almost hear GLaDOS’ voice, “Possession of or identification with anomalous. gender identities and presentations, is forbidden. Unfortunately, Aperture Sciences gender presentation protocols require immediate. termination. Have a nice day.”

   There were other stories, too, no less horrible.

   But what made me sad and furious and sobbing at my desk was the fact that for so many of the names? I found nothing. All the names that link back to the trans day of remembrance site do so because I could find no other record of that person having existed. Having lived. Having been murdered. Save for their position on a list of murdered trannies, these women had been killed horribly and erased.

   Completely.
3. Jim2 says:

   November 21, 2008 at 2:17 pm

   Violet,

   You might, if you have time, look in on the kerfuffle in Britain over Julie Bindel and the trans community. Thee was a post on it on Harry’s Place, and that wa sin response to an article of some sort in the Guardian. Not very nice.

   The trans community does not get even the love that the gay and lesbian communities get. Outrageous.

   Ttell me more about GLaDOS 1) if you have time, and 2) if you think there is anything to gain by having me know anything about them. From the short bit you have there though, I wonder about the last.
4. Lisa Kansas says:

   November 22, 2008 at 12:19 am

   Violet keeps promising to do a post on radical activism. This would be an excellent lead-in, I think.
5. violet says:

   November 22, 2008 at 4:36 am

   I think I keep getting hung up on the “post on radical activism” part of that, I think :p It’s kinda like writing a post on “feminism”—which you can do, obviously, but I’m finding myself lacking the motivation to do that kind of broad overview. I’ll probably instead end up doing a series dealing with radical responses to particular issues, with the issues chosen in no small part because they’re a part of my community.

   But this is, actually, a really good lead-in to that.

   You may also read the above two paragraphs as saying, “Soon. Sooooon.”

   You might, if you have time, look in on the kerfuffle in Britain over Julie Bindel and the trans community.

   I followed it vaguely at the time. It looks like she’s been nominated for the Stonewall award, which is rather fucking priceless, given that the Stonewall inn was non-trivially a bar for trans- and other gender variant people, and the police raid—you know, the one that sparked that lil’ riot thing—targeted people with non-normative gender presentation.

   Bindel seems to be among the set of feminists who feel that it’s both a good idea and, in fact, really important to police the borders of “woman”. I’m not sure why. The only coherent explanation I’ve ever seen amounts to “trans women are icky;”

   I’m given to understand that such strains of feminism are called “cultural feminism,” and are typically associated with the idea that men are just biologically predisposed to suck and if only women were in charge, things wouldn’t suck. Which makes perfect sense until you realize that there’s absolutely no reason in the world to believe it, and plenty of reasons to think it’s bullshit. It gives me some comfort that these women typically hold second-wave feminist writers like Dworkin in great regard; Dworkin, while problematic in some of her own ways, was vehemently opposed to gender essentialism, biological determinism, and gender policing.

   Tell me more about GLaDOS 1) if you have time, and 2) if you think there is anything to gain by having me know anything about them.

   Oh, err, the GLaDOS thing was a joke, in reference to the video game Portal. It may have been in poor taste to reference a darkly humorous, somewhat Kafkaesque video game while talking about the plodding extermination of trans people. (It may, alternately, have been in exactly the right taste.)
6. Jim2 says:

   November 24, 2008 at 4:19 pm

   Love your comments about Bindel. Delicious.

   It should be comical but it’s too sad for that, that a self-identified feminist should hate trans-people as much as the Neandertha….no, wait, that’s unfair – the backward peasants who killed these women. I can see some first-generation-to-wear-shoes traditionalist would have such a murderous attitude, but what does that say about Bindel and the like? You know what, I don’t care what it says about her ideology or her brand of feminism; the issue is psychological more than than ideological.