November 21st

Today is november 21st, which means that once again, i have forgotten the transgender day of remembrance. This year i forgot about the Trans Day of Remembrance in San Francisco, on one of the cities highest points, where the distance from the fog rolling through the golden gate to the bay bridge is only as far as a sidelong glance. I was absorbed with the thrill of running to this high place, the exhilaration of speed and strength. I was distracted by casserole dishes full of frittata for breakfast, and the lovely queer posse who cooked them. Then by hilariously prurient comic books, and by torrential rains and purple lightning, and conversations in the dark of a self-imposed blackout. I might have remembered at dusk, when the sun completed its impossibly long arc, and disappeared entirely, once more, into the fog and the western sea, might, perhaps, have caught the pang of fear in the sky's deep furrows of crimson and lavender. But the dark slate of thunderheads hid the sun with catharsis. Later, i ate greasy burgers and velveeta fries in good company, with whom i then didn't go to a historic gay bar (on account of its cover charge), opting instead for a steaming hot tub in a suburban thicket of redwood. I stood, naked and sweating, beneath the moon nearly full, and there was nothing, in that moment, to remind me of.

By this point I recognize the pattern, of laughter and forgetting, though yesterday i laughed better, beamed harder than in some previous years. This forgetting is a messy thing, bound up in the clothes i wear, the company i keep, the families i was born into and the ones i begin to piece together on my own. The mess notwithstanding, I think that I shall continue to forget trans remembrance day. 

For one day out of the year, it will be a luxury to forget that girls like us are anything but indestructible, and remain cozily oblivious to anything but how badass our friends are, and how ferocious we can be when we have each other's backs. for those few hours, we can afford the delirium of ignoring the threat which necessitates such solidarity, and is thus implied by it. We can have defense without assault, hard-won identity without the hardship or the fight. 

From 11:59:59 pm, november 19th, until the first seconds of november 21st, the only people who will ask me if i am a boy or a girl will be the children whose faces will brighten and whose heads will nod at my answer, and whose parents will shoot neither me nor their offspring any looks of cutting reproach. 

We will have 24 blissful hours during which we will be free to discuss the role of the moon in our miraculous transformations, and the comedy of our bodies, constantly being constructed ad-hoc. We will be the only ones howling, and the only ones laughing, and the glint of silver bullets will never cross our minds, nor the flicker of torches, held with pitchforks at the castle gates. we will take in the midnights on both ends, the better to appreciate the possibilities of night lived fearlessly.

Conversely, while our brethistren will spend the 20th in an indulgent amnesia, the world on the far side of the besquiggled gender divide will stand in rapt attention. The day of remembrance will be when our neighbors on the privileged shores of the gender divide remember the machinations of normative power, which daily surround them. They will feel the prickle of gender scrutiny tugging at the nape of their necks. In their every interaction, teeth in square jaws will be set on edge, manicured nails dug into palms. Skins used to comfort will crawl, and their residents will not be able to say if it is discomfort or existential self-doubt which sets them to squirming. The mundane iniquity of binarism, thrown into a razor-sharp relief, will stand alongside the great and terrible spectacle of all the world's trannies living 24 hours with total self-posession, in full command of our powers and abilities, in a world stripped of kryptonite. 

And then, one day, it will once again be the time for remembering. On the calendar, this new Remembrance Day will follow the Celebration of Armed Transgender Self-Defense. It will fall five months and one day after Juneteenth, that dual memorial to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Abolition of the Prison. The new Day of Remembrance will recall the days when every trans funeral was a riot, and the years in which the fury of our grief brought the gears of the State to a screeching halt. The new holiday will have its roots in a hasty call from those days of rage, a plea to corral the anger and the mourning, to preserve some semblance of business as usual. That first proposal will be as forgotten as the usual business it sought to salvage. Its descendant will find its home, in the third week of a november long after the fires have subsided, when we finally need a day to remember that, not so long ago, there was a world where we were killed in frantic hatred, and went to the grave in shame.

on that day, children will watch tedious documentaries in school, and perform clunky pageantry in which they will depict the horrors of gender policing and heteropatriarchy. they will act these scenes out woodenly, in costumes made from old bed sheets, and laugh in the middle of their lines. they will try, and fail, to imagine a world in which gender was an instrument of conformity and fear, rather than a tool of invention and inspiration. And when they fail, they will laugh.

and until that day comes, i am content to keep forgetting: 

That the only day set aside for our trans family is the one that reiterates the logic of the Tragic Hollywood Transsexual, and remembers us after we are safely dead. 

That it is a day whose name erases the role that racism and misogyny, the marginality of sex work, and the violence of the state play in the death toll. 

That we set aside so little effort and so few resources for the militant preservation of Trans Life. 

That we do so little to honor our strength, or the daily feat of trans survival.

Instead, I will forget. I will be loved and I will feel invincible, and I will laugh with the children of the future.

Just to be clear:

when i say i've reluctantly come to the conclusion that industrial civilization is destroying the planet,
i don't mean it like how this guy meant it.

christ. what an asshole.

-10 points for "WTF" appearing in your manifesto.
and -20, at least, for targeting (out of all cable programming in all the world) the fuckin' discovery channel.
i mean really now.

malthusianism is fucked. humans are just animals. and baby animals are awesome.

moreover, humans aren't built for destroying the planet.
we're built for running. we just get confused sometimes, that's all.

i have been trying to find the right way to put this, but it's not easy.

yesterday i wrote for hours about slavery and petroleum, the Transition movement and Lydia Maria Child.

there's a point to be made there, but i couldn't quite make it, because i feel a powerful need to cover my bases, explaining carefully, so i am not misunderstood, what is and is not the same about the chattel slavery economy and the petroleum economy. and what i hope and fear is, or is not, the same about Transition Northampton and the Northampton Society of Education and Industry.

i've also been reading stories about what the world might look like, once petroleum goes away, if slavery doesn't. they're quite good, and have gotten inside my head, in that way that unsettling parables do.

and i've been planning for grad school, in history. and reading derrick jensen for the first time, and spending a lot of time outside, down by a river that seems to get lower by the day, and the woods that are none of them much past 100 years old.

just now, a series of funny things. i read this sentence: "what are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?" and i could answer that question. more or less.

and then i read this: "I was recently in new england, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. he took this as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards." followed by a counterpoint: "technological and social innovation have enabled these yankees to deforest the globe."

and my first thought was that when i walk, or run, out to those century-old woods by the river, where i can identify burdock and lambs quarters and dandelion and acorns and nettle and daylily and a half dozen other edible plants, i find them in fields that get annually bush-hogged, and in the thin slips of young woods between.

and then the last funny thing that happened was that, in this same book, i read the name of a friend i fell out of touch with years ago, which spurred me to try to find the right way to say this again... and when i went upstairs, i found i'd left my coal burning computer open and idling on the website of the man who gave me that phrase.

the friend was someone who went to yale when this country was first invading iraq. she thought that the invasion was a really bad idea, and hung the flag upside-down out her window, and for her trouble, she had her living space invaded by a belligerent group of white undergrad men wielding 2x4s and racist epithets.

I remember the sense, at the time, that this kind of violence was waiting, out in the open, for anyone willing to say anything marginally honest about iraq, and this nation's military goals there. doubly so if these honest people failed to be straight white men.

and i remember being confused that someone who so gloriously failed to be such things would still be, as our mutual acquaintances told me she was, a primitivist. my exposure to primitivists at that point was mostly to the variety that seemed excited about The Collapse, and the fantasy of eking out a hard-bitten survivalist existence that was nasty, brutish, and short, in the deer hide pants that they had already made for the occaision. i had, and have, little patience, and something verging on utter contempt, for dudes whose rejection of "civilization" stems from civilization's emasculating nanny culture that fails to separate the men from the boys... or whatever. so i wrote off primitivism and deep ecology and "anti-civ" as so much masturbatory ablist heteropatriarchal macho fantasy, with a fetish for the noble savage. There's a slight aftertaste, bitter and lingering, of some of that in Jensen's writings.

at the beginning of my senior year in college, i watched Post-Katrina New Orleans happen. and i worked on my thesis during spring break, when most of my friends went to new orleans for the same reasons i later did - a powerful need to do something.

and when i got down there, i found that Post-Katrina New Orleans had taken place just like The Gulf War. and what is most upsetting, and hardest to shake, is that new orleans absolutely refuses to be anywhere but the real world. which means that what happens there happens because of what happens here. the same world, the same rules, the same patterns of inputs and outputs. 

at the beginning of the summer, two lovely friends from new orleans visited my home town, and we talked about the Deepwater Horizon. gallows humor, mostly. a few weeks ago, a wonderfully thoughtful mentor and i sat down to lunch, and she said "It's gotten to the point where things are so fucked that I can't take it all in." we were talking about the collapsing lobster population in the atlantic, and about the Deepwater Horizon, which had still not been capped.

i've reluctantly revisited my dismissal of primitivism. or rather, i've come to the conclusion that all my discomfort with The Dudebros Of The Apocolypse is merited. and that calling it "civilization" is complicated, but that the industrial petroleum economy is going to burn itself out, that there are other economies waiting to take its place, and they are also going to burn themselves out, and that in so doing, those economic systems are going to continue destroying vast areas of the world, and vast numbers of its inhabitants. Look at the gulf, or that other gulf that oil comes from. or the niger delta, or the appalachians. or the Sundarbans. one of the helpful things about Jensen is that he insists we already know plenty of examples. and i find that i do.

basically, i have, in the last several years, stopped seeing apocalypse as an adventure fantasy, and have started to see it as a fairly honest way of describing actual events. a partial description, because apocalypse, as a concept, has two parts. the first part is the end of the world in question. then the veil-lifting part. and we've got the worlds ending part. it's been with us since 1492 (in Al-Andalus and Guanahani both) and before, and since. the difference now is that many different sorts of worlds seem to be ending at once. 


there's some level of consensus on oil discovery and production being well over the hill. ditto the effects of climate change. and as joni seager doesn't quite put it in her wonderful talk at barnard, fuck a bunch of 2 degrees feel-good bullshit.
it's the revelation part that we're still waiting on. not The Case Of Chosen v. Fallen kind of revelation. the other one, where knowledge gets assimilated, incorporated, and acted on.

So i'm marking the end of this summer by taking the GRE, and then looking after some dogs, and then going to work with some Queer Family in tennessee. and from there, i'm hoping to go visit a lot of people i care about, in a lot of places i've never been, and try to figure out the right thing to do, somewhere in the process. 

because i know that i can wake up in the morning and write my thesis instead of going to new orleans. i've made that decision before.

but there are deeper and more simple questions, about far less familiar and far more apparent options.

And i'd appreciate some input.

RUN

In the ongoing debate over Whether We Should Do It, Nike have generally held a pretty consistent position. To put it mildly, they are in disagreement with Frankie's view.

 Frankie assume that we want to Do It. Nike tell us that we Don't want to Do It, but hold out the hope that we may be able to Just impulse-buy our way out of that lethargy. With help, of course, from Nike.

But then sometimes Nike Say somewhat different things about doing it.

Sure, we have that special, disempowering form of women's empowerment, where women still get targeted and objectified like in any slasher film, but are then empowered to not die by the products they purchase! But i also see what Nike did there, with the turning of the slasher film pastiche on its michael-meyers-visaged head. and there's something worth salvaging from it: running away is awesome.

Chainsaw Man has all the Power signifiers. he's a burly, masked, fully clothed dude. he has a deep throaty growl, a chainsaw, and the element of surprise.

Fleeing Woman has all of the powerlessness signifiers. she's a slight, partially disrobed, unarmed lady with a high-pitched scream and no obvious means of defense. in a normal slasher movie, FW would grab a kitchen knife, lock herself in a closet or bathroom, and/or run outside into the protective arms of Big Strong Man, who will then take up his patriarchal protective responsibility.

FW doesn't do any of this, she just takes off. Nike wants to associate itself with her ability to run, which is bullshit for reasons i'll get into another time. but all the things that make FW look like the inevitable victim of CM in the typical misogynistic slasher narrative are quite the opposite if her goal isn't to defeat the bad guy and defend the territory of The Home. minimal clothes make movement easier and body temperature self-regulating. no mask makes breathing easier. and it's much easier to run when you're not carrying a growling chainsaw.

and as she heads off into the night, FW isn't looking for BS Man who will fight for her. nor a closet to lock herself in. she's just running.

Running from a conflict is supposed to be bad. "cut and run" is now used in political posturing to mean, roughly "i support the war and don't care that my figure of speech implies that our ship of state will shortly be dashed to splinters by the oncoming storm." The imperative to hold the line insists on the failure of giving up property or territory or an affected posture of Power, which are all made more or less synonymous. Holding your ground, or your stuff, or your burly bravado, all require the ontological certainty that anything so defended will be safe, or more generally, that you can define a space, and keep out the things you don't want.

Any trans person who's ever used a public bathroom can attest to the safety of such defended spaces.
so can, hopefully, anyone who's paying marginally close attention to the current debates over immigration.
or anyone who's ever been present uninvited on a college campus, or in a corporate building.
or any queer person or other mutant who's been ensconced in the normative safety of The Home.
or ask Francine. or Mrs. Torrence.

the call always comes from inside the house.
or more to the point, the zombies always get in, and if the cavalry shows up, then you're stuck with the cavalry.

Holding the line never just requires grit and guns. it requires a chain of command, and uniforms, and the brig. and the first to be frog-marched to the brig are always the people who we've been holding the line down on top of. their bodies make our line waver treacherously, and this Will Not Do.

but the good news is, the line can't be held. you can't stay pure, and you can't stay clean, and you can't stay safe, and you can't keep from getting hurt, and that door won't hold forever. but you can run away. you can't carry much with you when you do. and that's a good thing. so relax.

what we can do is keep moving. resist the logic that says we have to stay put, have to clean up, have to defend what we have, where we are, because someone else wants it and somewhere else will be worse.

we can keep running longer than anything else with feet. ain't nothing can keep up with us once we get moving. not the creep with the chainsaw, not your husband with the axe, not the zombie, and not the man with the gun

quick. the world we thought we knew is burning. drop everything and run.

visualization aids in learning

Info from the Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries.
(thanks to Casual Entropy for the link)


the original, higer-resolution version of this video is set to Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills."
for those unfamiliar, that's a song by the heavy metal band about the genocidal Indian Wars of the 1800s.
which wouldn't be so bad if the youtubes didn't keep urging me to buy the MP3 on itunes, and present me with popup ads about designer shoes. moreover, it's worth mentioning that, to this day, standard US military parlance refers to all territory not under US or Allied control as "Indian Country."

the obvious

< stating it >
although it's been said,
many times, many ways,
bear with me.

because now that everyone else has said it,
it's worth saying again.

we are not doing anyone any favors by continuing to occupy Afghanistan.
No wait, let me rephrase that. We, the taxpayers who fund the US military, have actually allowed our employees to do many favors, for many people. Many of these people are in the Pakistani military, including the Directorate For Inter-Services Intelligence, and the Taliban.

To whatever more abstracted degree support for the Taliban has been enabled by US drone attacks which predictably kill civilians and destroy towns, to whatever degree our strategy has transformed the embattled ruling cadre of the Talib into an ethnic Pashtun nationalist anti-occupation insurgency, the fact remains.

We Fund The Taliban. No past tense. We're doing it right now. We give money to warlords, they give it to the Taliban. We give money to Pakistan, they give it to the Taliban. The Occupation Funds The Taliban.

We can, and clearly do, pretend otherwise.
It's not that it's so glaringly obvious, or so embarrassingly well established as to be impossible to ignore.
It is well within our power to keep ignoring the old information. I have total confidence that we can continue to do so, while simultaneously dismissing new information as "nothing new."

We can keep doing it until we lose.
< / stating it >

Wikileaks and the security of communities

go listen to this

it's just under an hour and a half long. and it's worth it.

what you're listening to, incidentally, is the keynote speech for the HOPE conference, which is a semiregular conference in NYC, the 8th of which is winding up today.

the keynote speaker was announced, as of yesterday, to be This Man, who, as the actual speaker tells his audience of computer whizzes and feds early on, will not be able to make it, because of the overwhelming interest of the latter group.

The target audience of this speech, in fact of this conference, is knowledgeable about computers to a stunning degree. i don't understand a lot of the specific technical stuff Applebaum is talking about. and i'm ok with that (though i'd still like someone to walk me through securely installing Tor) because the social dynamics at play here are at least as interesting.

These are computer geeks with political and rhetorical savvy: The likelihood that Assange would make it into the US was very small at the time when his keynote was announced. BUT saying he'd be there guaranteed that a helluva lot of intelligence operatives and agents of various persuasions would show. which provides a really lovely teachable moment about how hierarchical and authoritarian structures are obligated to respond to stimuli in predictable ways, and that those patterns tend towards assuming people are "leaders" of organizations which can be structurally "decapitated."

this, no matter how many times those supposed leaders explain that they are not so much calling down the rain as observing the direction of the wind, and though they may be supa dupa fly, they do not have the keys to the jeep, as it were.

So the guy with the microphone isn't Assange, he's some guy named Applebaum who I never heard of before. And he takes that first teachable moment, and turns it into a different one, about the resilience of community, and how "leaders" and figureheads aren't the source of a community's power, but emergent properties of it. He doesn't say it in quite this way, but in that moment, the State had responded in its predictable way, and has succeeded, sort of. The speech is the moment immediately after, where the community is running around like a hydra with its head cut off.

The community that Applebaum invokes has far more interesting implications than its defanged contemporary usage. it's not a synonym for "identity grouping." it's an obligation, and a security protocol. and if you neglect your community, that compromises the security system. which, in cryptographese, is called an attack.

Applebaum talks about someone who performed this kind of attack. (more background & etc.)
i don't know if the parallels with avoidance speech mourning practices is intentional, but it's striking. saying someone has no name anymore, in this context, has profound practical implications. they're no longer a trusted node. this in a set of systems where identity verification is everything, and is the source of one of the only widespread means of strong encryption.

keep listening for the parts where Applebaum talks about community.
dissidents, especially computer geek dissidents, get painted as antisocial like nobody's business, and there's something truly beautiful about hearing the idea of collective interresponsibility, and the drive to keep your people safe, invoked so passionately by someone with such a broad understanding of his collective, and so much of the wherewithal to aid in that safety.

it's worth saying, frequently, that the current wars are not about far off places we don't understand, but about us, and what we allow to be funded, and how far we can expand our universe of empathy, and what our societal response to crisis is. it's worth saying that war is a process by which destruction and suffering are manufactured domestically, for foreign consumption. so i always appreciate when someone  bothers to say it.

and then listen to the part where he invokes Harvey Milk. because it's a really wonderful reminder that coming out was never just about saying "hey, i have an immutable individual identity! if the status quo can assimilate it i'll stop bugging you!" It was actually about asking the people who wanted to see you dead if they would like say it to your face, when you ran into them at family gatherings. it was about strategy, and it was about passion, and it was about community, and it was about making it personal.

in the end what i get out of this, even when i can't understand the jargon, is that caring about people is powerful. tangibly so. and that being able to care about and and trust people is a valuable security resource, and a tool with almost limitless social potential.

7-7-10

yesterday broke 100 degrees fahrenheit.

or not broke, exactly. monday too had bested the double digits

this has happened 8 other times.

to be clear: by "this" i don't mean back-to-back triple-digit-days.

nor do i mean 101 degree july 5ths, or 6ths.

i mean that this little bend in the Connecticut river has seen ten days this hot in recorded history, and two of them happened in the last 48 hours.

3 out of 10 since i graduated college.

to account for the next 3 you have to go back to the summer that the civil rights act was passed.

but since the dawn of the standardized mercury thermometer in western massachusetts, every single day above 100 has come since the birth of Queen Elizabeth II.


The front page of tomorrow's paper lists another ten days. On these ten days, residents of New England drew more electricity from our coal-and-nuclear grid than at any other time in history. None of these days is so much as 5 years distant.

this morning the dial in the shade outside the kitchen window read 90 degrees by 10AM, while the cylinder out the back door catches a glint of sun, and reads above 110. officially, this is not another 100 degree day. The Official Thermometer can sit in the shade all day and lose no credibility.

residents of the United States have a long and distinguished history of believing themselves outside of history, or avatars of the driving forces of history, or witnesses to the denouement. Being all of these at once, history is reduced to teleology, an ugly fable to which we are the moral. We speed towards ourselves along this story's only trajectory, which is a brutal process of elimination.


Yesterday I waded barefoot through a riverbed lined with smooth stones, pottery shards and bits of brick with edges worn round. I watched the sun set over a field of feral peas and brassicas, sitting in among the Queen Anne's Lace in a stand of sumac. The field has been pocumtuc land, the border territory with nipmuc, then logged and farmed for a hundred years. Just over the rise, 205 years, one month and 2 days ago, on a hill called Pancake Plain, two irishmen, Dominic and James, were hanged for murder and with scant evidence. Farmland, a few trees, and a crowd of fifteen thousands looked on. Fifty years on, the field was farmed again, now by the inmates of a State Asylum. In the quiet of the baking sun, the sumac grows back in the poor soil, and the remains of an Institutional foundation and its attendant coal boiler fall slowly down the hill behind me.


I watch the sun set on what may not be the hottest day of the year, and i listen to the highway, 
and i wonder if America only concerns himself with the end of the World because he has already ended so many of them.

Soldiers' resistance, the Trans Well Of Loneliness, resistance and queer community: Separately, and wearing boots.

I've been meaning to put together a coherent intro post about this blog, and the name.
but poesy is important. And when unexpected allusions jump out at you, it's important to take a hint.


so let's talk about Bradley Manning.


What we know is that Manning:

• holds the rank of Private First Class in the US Army
• served as an intelligence analyst
• is being held without charge, as of late May, at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, after allegedly leaking the Collateral Murder raw video, and potentially more than 200,000 state department cables and details of hundreds of thousands of incidents from the iraq war, along with other sensitive files, to Wikileaks
• was implicated in the Wikileaks matter by what appears to be unencrypted instant message correspondence with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker with "links to the LGBT community" turned threat analyst, journalist, and FBI informant, who was diagnosed last month with Asperger's.
• The "informant" part comes from Lamo turning over his chat logs with Manning to the federal government. This after Lamo assured Manning that he was both a journalist and an ordained minister, and thus would treat anything Manning said as the words of a confidential source and as confessional.

While the inadvisable nature of telling a snitch where they can shove it is a matter of historical record, it is also a matter of historical record that snitches have no friends, terrible sex lives, never experience true love, are unbelievably boring, die alone, and deep down even their pets don't actually like them.

Also, cismen who snitch experience chronic persistent erectile disfunction. Alone.

(A note on the link: Ms. Kibby was found not guilty.)

(Mostly unredacted portions of the chat logs and further links can be found here. As for the "few words regarding specifics of personal issues not directly related to the whistleblowing/national security concerns at hand," keep reading.)

What we absolutely do not know, and what is pure speculation, but at this point increasingly pervasive speculation, is that some of Manning's non sequitur asides during chats with Lamo were not, in fact, non sequiturs at all, but were "portion[s] of the exchange... tightly packed with trans code words and lingo and analogies." This from an anonymous "source with deep ties to the LGBT community" providing a quote to Boing Boing.

Just to say again: we don't know that Manning is trans. The logs show "bradass87" as distraught, overwhelmed by the magnitude and powerul dirtiness of the government dirt in question, and (this is something other than pure speculation) lonely and scared shitless.

Bradass87 says some muddly things about not wanting pictures of them "as a boy" plastered all over the internet, along with some comments about how "the cpu is not made for this motherboard," wanting "time to figure myself out," figuring out "transition" (which could mean getting discharged from the army for having an "adjustment disorder." Adjustment Disorder NOS, in the civilian world, is the blanket diagnosis your shrink puts down so they can get paid for their time treating you, without giving you a specific diagnostic label that your insurance provider could find out about.)

If you go to the Boingboing piece, it's worth noting that over there, they treat personal matters of identity with equal or greater reverence (or something) than they do classified government documents. I appreciate that Xeni Jardin is trying to be respectful. I'm also assuming she's not queer or trans, because she relies on an anonymous source to tell her whether things are queer or not. But if she can find "a source with deep roots in the LGBT community" who's willing to speak for All Trans People regarding the secret codewords we use, then she could really go the extra mile and find someone willing to identify themselves as a Trans Person Who Thinks They Can Speak For All Trans People. 


As it stands, doing it this way has the effect of making "a source with deep roots in the LGBT community" analogous to "a source in the intellgence community." Saying our names is like that Valerie Plame thing, but, y'know, gayer.

So, as a named source within the LGBT (sort of) community, with codeword clearance, I am issuing a directive to allies and well-meaning cispeople. CCed to Trans Folk Who Think They Can Speak For All Trans People. I'm also forwarding the directive to Xeni Jardin of Boingboing, for the sake of redundancy. 

----------------------------------

Directive begins: 

Be it known that Global Gender Command has never, and does not at this time possess an encryption system decipherable by all active gender operatives, but opaque to the cispublic. Any claims to the contrary by any gender operative must either draw that operative's security status into question, or indicate an ongoing intelligence exercise whereby the operative is making fun of you.

Be So Advised,

Field Operative Beatrix Dang,

Subaltern First Class

Gender Command Group Delta (operations classified and ongoing), 

authorization passphrase LOOK NOW SERIOUSLY

Directive ends.

---------------------------

I'm queerer than a football bat, I have been diagnosed with "Adjustment Disorder (not otherwise specified)" and have a letter in my wallet explaining how I have GID and the only treatment is for people to treat me like my gender means something. If I got no freakin idea whether Manning's trans or not, then none of the rest of these homos do either. The special information queer and trans folks might have boils down to the  particular odor with which the whole thing stinks to the highest of the heavens. This ranges from (a) the way Manning may have been outed by well-meaning techie "allies" while already in military custody overseas to (b) the fact that a techie diagnosed with mental troubles and with possible queer status was turned over to the feds by a queer techie diagnosed with mental troubles.


To recap: I don't know if Manning is trans or queer, and neither do you.

Having gotten that bit of nonsense off my chest, let's return to the matter at hand.

If there is substance to the groundless speculation that PFC Manning is trans, then a member of the family was betrayed to the feds by someone they thought they could trust. We can assume that they will be mistreated in a manner unfamiliar to most middle class, cisgender, heterosexual white people. We can further assume that the matter of gender identity will be used as leverage against PFC Manning, as an insult, a humiliation, and a means of manipulation during the course of the interrogation.

If, on the other hand, the speculation about Manning's gender identity turns out to be both groundless and wrong, then a 22 year old kid, already at wit's end and scared shitless, was betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. We can assume that he will be mistreated in a manner unfamiliar to the standards of domestic civilian courts and constitutional protections. We can further assume that the matter of gender identity will be used as leverage against PFC manning, as an insult, a humiliation, and a means of manipulation during the course of the interrogation.

Now that The Trans Speculation has begun, Manning's story should be broadcast far and wide, so that the military will feel sorta self conscious and follow something approximating their own particular variety of due(ish) process. Because this is an opportunity to support someone who needs it, while clearly articulating the ways that homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing are real and potentially very dangerous things for everyone. 

So go back and watch the collateral murder video, just the short one. It's horrifically violent, and shows helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians while the gunners and pilots laugh. several of those civilians were journalists and none of them were armed. We can assume this because there is no reason not to use your gun when you are being shot by a helicopter.

If Manning did what has been alleged, then that video exists as a public document only because of the PFC's actions. Manning encountered this video, and possibly many thousands of other documents, and was so affected by their contents that conscience, disillusionment, and visceral revulsion drove them to Wikileaks, hoping that exposing the documents "might actually change something."

I don't know what Manning's "adjustment disorder" is providing cover for, or what the "transition" might consist of. But that's not to say I don't care. The story that's already starting to emerge from this is familiar. 


Communists-And-Fellow-Travelers familiar, and it goes like this: 

Queer folk are unstable, and the paranoia that someone will expose their queerness will drive them to betray state secrets. (the solution is to explicitly bar overt queerness in the military, so all queerness will be covert, and the paranoia will be powerful enough to keep mouths shut.)

Or Bayard Rustin familiar, and then it goes like this:

Sure, queer folk do great and heroic things of great historical import, but they do those things because they're great and heroic PEOPLE of great historical import, and queerness has nothing to do with it. Mentioning queerness cheapens their heroism and allows them to be marginalized and ignored. (the solution is to marginalize and ignore the queerness of great and heroic people, which will prevent any queer people in the future from imagining that they might be great or heroic, or do anything of great historical import.)

Orbiting all of this is a narrative of trans experience, and most especially transfemininity, that is textbook Cold War Lavender Scare caricature of the homosexual: 

The Homosexual Transexual, Operational Security threats of:

Pathological, unstable, incontinent in the ability to retain sensitive information and to restrain their bizarre urges. A member of a pervasive-yet-elusive secret society present in the very foundations of our hallowed military-industrial complex, the homosexual transexual is nonetheless vulnerable for exploitation as an intelligence asset by our enemies because of the perpetual loneliness and emotional excess intrinsic to the condition.

Anyone who's gone to high school can tell you that queerness is far from invisible. Everybody thinks about us all the time, and sees signs of us everywhere, in their friends, in their rivals, in the unpopular kids, in themselves. Thanks to Don't Ask/Don't Tell, the military has finally gotten a chance to extend the high school experience, and incorporate a lot of ambient violence and firearms. But I'd like to propose that the previous, HUAC-esque formation isn't completely or totally wrong about queerness and its role in undermining national security. The "invisibility" of queerness (which I am intentionally using to encompass gender deviance, because as referenced above, antagonism towards either is really about the same thing.) isn't invisibility at all, it's a constant proving ground fueled by some of the ugliest of heteronormative social impulses. But what might be true about the Lavender Scare mythos is this: the isolation this engenders can allow us, as queers, access to different ways of forming community, which produce multiple, complex allegiances. 

When the operation of the machine systematically excludes you and stigmatizes you, kills and mistreats people like you with impunity, when it calls you sick and odious, then you are constantly confronted with the mismatch between your prescribed role and the person you think you might be. Having an adjustment disorder not otherwise specified or PTSD, are not things that destabilize people such that they go crazy and disclose military secrets. PTSD and adjustment disorders are the sorts of things we might expect to develop in people who are trying desperately to incorporate the violent and dehumanizing day to day realities of military life into a sense of who they are. A queer or trans identity just might sometimes give you some wiggle room to take a look at your situation, separate your orders and job description from what you can live with, and do something subversive, because you feel that you have to.

So if Manning isn't trans, which is likely, and leaked the files, which is possible, then thanks, kid. I think you did the right thing in an unbelievably scary situation. You're way too young to be a martyr to anybody's cause, and I hope like hell that the leaks really do change something. In the meantime you have my support.

And if Manning is trans, which is possible, then welcome to the family darlin! Join our pervasive-yet-elusive secret society just so fast as ever you can, it beats the hell out of the loneliness, and we're here for you. Just don't think that "we" are the people you meet in support groups or that pathetic, sad, emotionally unfulfilled Lamo douchebag. few of us might be, but the powerful community lies elsewhere. find the queers and we will love the shit out of you. You're still way too young to be a martyr to anyone's cause. And if you're behind the leaks, which is possible, then damn you are one fierce whatever-you-wanna-call-it. come home quick, come home safe, tear shit up and be your beautiful self.

I'm not asking. i'm just telling:

One way or the other, PFC Manning, You have rocked the world.

(edited for typos and cohesion.)

the geography of the Open Letter: how to make it home to where your children live without burning down the forest or drowning anybody.

On behalf of all the trans kids Somewhere Out There:

This is a message to the Loving, Well Meaning and Terrified Parents of Trans Children, and all the other adults (ahem, ira) who are so very afraid of what everybody else, and they themselves, might think about all this. Because reassuring cispeople is a job I don't get paid for, but I have an amazing family who used to be really scared by all this too. and because i think i'm finally figuring out what to say, and getting old enough that grown-ups might listen:

Thank you for talking about it. thank you for going through your process. you need it, so we need you to do it. We thank you for loving our new generation, for trying and stumbling, and for being as nurturing as you know how.

and i thank you for not stealing our family's next generation from us, for not trying to fix them or erase them in one way or the other.

I have just thanked you for not hating and annihilating your own children. That should not merit gratitude, but i have given you my thanks. now you must carry it with you. i apologize that it is cumbersome. but as you wander down this steep path, you may have need of remembering that burden.

and with those same hands, carry your process. it is a gift that our world desperately needs, almost as badly as yours does. rush down the hill with your passion, like prometheus bringing fire down through the hills of southern california.

screw up, make a mess, feel a total idiot and come back to us, slowly cleaning up after yourselves. hair and trees almost always come back if you give them time. we will if you will.

but own it. it's your process. get to know it, get uncomfortable in it. stretch out until you can feel its seams. learn to hear it reflected every time a kid talks about dreaming of being Normal,

and being invisible,

of vanishing down to a mote of dust,

and being a total secret

that nobody

would

ever

know.

get to recognize the echo of your own voice, or you'll wander forever in circles in the canyon, your voice causing terrible avalanches that will never bury your house. but there are other people down here in this canyon. and after all, don't you want to get out? eventually?

be open about your fear of the process. you're lost, and that's scary. and lost is not the worst thing to be. you'd be surprised what you'll find when none of the paths you've been told about lead you anywhere you want to go.

there is a deep, slow river in the valley. your fear is the fear of falling off the bridge, in the instant before you understand that there are such things as fish, and swimming.

take a deep breath. your first impulse is to hyperventilate, but the water is not so cold.

slow down. your first move is to thrash, desperate to cling to anything you can hold in those first few disorienting moments. anything which seems constant with the firm reality of solid ground.

but you can't stand on water, you can't dig into it and leave grit in your nails. neither can we.

the current is gentle, and the handholds you have found are parts of other people's lives, and other people's bodies. some of us are new to life in this river too. none of us can keep you afloat for long if you don't turn your furious stamping feet to kicking, your desperate grasp to paddling.

you already know how to swim, if you will remember that this is what the situation calls for.

you even know this river, if you can bring yourself to the necessary vantage point. This canyon you have lost yourself in is carved by its flow. you have lived in the mountains which hide its source. you have felt its currents before. you may not quite remember, but all your life, from time to time, you have found your way to its banks, where so much grows. returning home, your parents and your teachers, your lovers and colleagues and friends have sometimes pointed out the mud on your feet. when they have smiled at your dark footprints, it is because they almost remember the feeling of mud between their toes. and when they frown and scold, or say nothing, it is for the same reason.

you know the contours of those banks, even if you have forgotten the river until now.

you can make your way back to the shallows. whether you thrash frantically, swim confidently, or let yourself float, you will find your way. the difference is how much water you choke on and how many you have dragged down.

floating or swimming gets you to the most hospitable terrain though, trust me on this.

your hands are empty now, and there is muck under your fingernails, mud past your knees and beyond your elbows. i do apologize for this part: the river has tricked you, and we have been complicit in it. The burden you carried was not fire, after all, not only. This is a complicated river, and it has complicated ways of replenishing itself.

hold steady: your inner ear has grown used to the river's current, and now you are back standing on one bank or another. nausea and vertigo - we've all felt it, don't worry. some make it this far only to mistake those feelings for mortal illness, terror even. find the horizon. find the horizon, if it helps.

there's more stumbling to do, and now you're at a strange bend in the river, covered in mud. the mud can come off, once it's dry, don't worry if you have taken on new contours underneath.

this part is not a trick: the mud can dry out, but you never will. once you've been in the river, it leaves its mark. not all that visible, just something you'll feel when others brush up against you, or your shoes squelch on dry pavement.

but all that's still to come. for now, if you're very careful, you can find your way, mud-covered as you are, to the village we've built along the banks. we're waiting for you there, your children and their family. sometimes, our friends will get confused, think you're a visitor from the other bank. you might be, too. it's partly the mud, if that helps. down here on the banks, the river connects more than it divides, and it's not that far across. You won't be the only one covered in mud. so when the sunlight and the mud play tricks, on your eyes or theirs, feel the flow of the river and go easy.

take a breath. we're glad you're here, and these kids already know that a girl who looks like a boy is not such a bad thing to be, if you don't mind the mud.

you will be surprised how well they can swim, your children. sometimes they'll seem to hop from bank to bank, but its our village over there too. other times they'll dive into the current and disappear down the bend, through rapids, over waterfalls. the flow of the river is complicated, sometimes they'll be carried upstream.

the gift that you have brought is yourself, what you put into the river, your own eddies and tributaries. some of the gifts you get back are bruised toes in wet shoes, scalded fingers, water up your nose, and all that mud. The other gift is this: your children will be much braver, more wide-eyed, and have more incredible adventures than we can ever imagine, if you let them.

Sensitive Men In Suits and their Lady Producers Talk About Gender Dysphoria.

This American Life is a very good radio program. it stands head and shoulders above every other NPR show save radiolab. And radiolab is an unfair standard against which to measure anything. But both shows work because so much of their affect and politics seem to be shaped by a constant confrontation with human experiences of the world, and an openness to being undone by that confrontation, and those experiences.

But Ira Glass, he of the soothing-and-seemingly-unrehearsed radio informality, slips into being the Unequivocal Voice of the very self-consciously equivocal radio program. Ira is that sensitive, bespectacled, soft-spoken, lightly tousled, don't-quite-buy-that-he's-straight variety of man, instantly recognizable to the plentiful offspring of any number of progressive liberal arts Alma Maters. The problem with this kind of guy (as anyone who's made it through a class, a party, a few drinks, or an uncomfortable and abortive flirtation with him can attest) is that he's so performatively careful in choosing his words, he'll choose ones you're really not ok with before you can catch it. and when you do catch it, you feel sort of bad bringing it up. Because he's so nice, after all, and really seems to genuinely get it, most of the time. And we wouldn't want to shut him down, right? So he can provide the unifying theme for stories of disparate experiences, share his seemingly thoughtful, hesitantly-arrived-at generalizations, and his producers will join him in the background noise of Polite and Genuine Interest. There's a lot of Interest in This American Life, and very little Passion. the experiences Ira & Co confront might undo or disturb some part of their world, but the moment when the undoing happens is always being recalled, after it's been assimilated and dealt with. This American Life already knows what they think about what you're about to hear. but they might be politely interested in how you feel about it, once you hear it.

(Jad and Robert, on the other hand, are loud, and silly, and absolutely firm in their beliefs. Beliefs which are performed as constantly in flux, and drastically different from those of their co-host. These are differences they will argue about up until the moment of being undone by the big, loud, messy, beautiful, jaw-dropping Eureka moment which Radiolab pivots around. And then they'll catch their breath, change their minds a bit, and resume arguing.)

but that's not what i came to tell you about,

i came to talk about the draft.

Just today, I listened to Ira & Co's podcast from 2 weeks ago. This episode, for reference and context, is entitled "Somewhere Out There."

Chronologically, the episode starts with a story of running numbers to find out how many potential partners any individual might have, in the universe, the world, or the city of boston. but ontologically, it starts with a world where everyone has one single fated life partner. This fate is recognized as a fiction, but an emotionally True fiction. the specialness of a heterosexual pair bond lies, to an enormous extent, in the feeling that it is the Only Possible True Pairing. (whether the rest of us have that problem is left unresolved, as our existence is mentioned throughout, but only by exclusion. the first statistical order of business when running the numbers is to eliminate members of the same sex from the pool.) so, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this week's episode is about the Possibly Futile Search for the One Other Person Out There who will understand and complete you. which sounds, to me, like the blurb on the back cover of the Trashy Bestseller of heteronormativity and the neoliberal nuclear family.

As if dizzied by trying to focus on sexual and gender experiences so close to the end of its own nose, this collection of stories takes a sudden zag out of the romantic realm altogether, and starts talking about Thomasina and Lilly, two young girls who meet and are instant best friends. I realized that this was not going to be a Gay Story at the instant of the Reveal:

Thomasina and Lilly are both transgender. We can now rest assured that the rest of the segment will focus on the trauma that this has inflicted upon their families, and their struggles to fit in as totally normative, unremarkable, appropriately feminine girls.

and i don't imagine the producers of this american life know they've tapped into this genre, but the rest of us now also know that this will be a story about being petrifyingly alone, and maybe managing to find one other person like you, who can, in the most chaste manner possible, penetrate the well of loneliness for a fleeting moment. (anyone who thinks trans women don't belong in lesbian separatist spaces, just look at pop depictions of our social lives while wearing a flapper dress, and it'll all start to make sense).

What's sort of reassuring though, is how much of the fear and trauma in all the rest of the story is so transparently... parental. Thomasina's parents are the ones who are bereft, without support structure. They try to find other parents with similar experiences, but can't. None of their friends even understand that such a thing is real. then Lilly and Thomasina talk about their friends, and the conversations they have with those friends about The Trans. Those conversations are about genuine friendship and genuine ambiguity. All their positive fantasies seem to focus on not having gender matter so god damned much. And the worries their conversations bring up seem to focus on a negative fantasy of media exposure and shame. and for this tranny's money, 9 year olds don't come up with a fear of paparazzi on their own.

and then Lilly's mom cries about how her daughter said she was angry at god, and about having to send her daughter to school with a haircut that made her look like a boy. and Thomasina's dad cries about the emotional and mental reality of the situation for his kid, while using the wrong pronouns.

and the kids, through all of it, seem pretty fine. and don't seem desperate to maintain this one, precious connection in the way their parents are.

The Kids Are Alright. Let Them Be.