- 12 charts and maps that explain the Greek crisis – Vox
- These 25 Examples of Male Privilege from a Trans Guy’s Perspective Really Prove the Point — Everyday Feminism
- Environmental activism works, study shows | EurekAlert! Science News
- Eight Books You Need To Know About To Understand The Hugo Awards Snafu. This article compares what various reviewers and Puppies have said about eight books.
- Girl Scouts choose transgender girls over $100,000 donation – The Washington Post. But then online social fundraising came to the rescue! An interesting story shows how individual wealthy donors, in some cases, have less leverage than they once did.
- White America’s racial illiteracy: Why our national conversation is poisoned from the start – Salon.com
- The Genderbread Person v3 An attempt to visualize the various elements of gender and sex.
- Officer Pupke Johnathan Edelstein has been contributing some delightful rewritten songs to the File770 comments, and I think this one is my favorite so far. Here’s a verse, click through for the whole thing: “TORGERSEN: Dear kindly judge, your Honor / My buddies need a chance / They’ve not been nominated / And asked to join the dance. / Minorities and women / Have got this thing sewn up / Leapin’ lizards, that’s why I’m a Pup!”
- These pages from a graphic-novel-in-progres0s, by Thomke Meyer, are OMG beautiful. This isn’t the only way to do science fiction or fantasy comics well, but it’s an extremely fruitful one, that takes advantages of comics’ strength as a medium.
- Queen Bees are Stinging Mad . Stonewall Uprising . WGBH American Experience | PBS A 1969 article from the New York Daily News. Among many things of interest is a discussion of a same-sex marriage, which again shows that same-sex marriage isn’t an idea created by the Massachusetts court system 11 years ago.
- Bristol Reminds Us: Shaming Women and Policing Their Bodies Doesn’t Work
- Tennessee Hardware Store Posts ‘No Gays Allowed’ Sign In Response To SCOTUS Marriage Ruling – Towleroad
- Kentucky Clerks Refuse Marriage Licenses To All Couples, Cite ‘Religious Beliefs’- Towleroad
- Last laugh for Republicans in the SCOTUS session that was | xpostfactoid The Supreme Court has accepted two cases that will allow it to do further major damage to unions and to affirmative action.
- How Do You Make a Safe Abortion Any Safer? As usual, pro-life arguments are being made in bad faith.
- Today we gain a leap second. Why? – Boing Boing
- Yeah, baby–new Overtime pay rule is out and it’s strong! | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
- Who can write stories about Trans characters? Contains criticism of Hedwig.
- The Debate Link: Seventy Years Later. The global Jewish population level has almost reached pre-Holocaust levels.
- “A pessimism trap is where something good has happened, but it’s not cool to be excited that something good happened, so everyone starts trying to temper their joy with cynical comments about how it doesn’t mean much anyway and how it’ll really make things worse.”
- Why Are SSM Rights Doing Better Than Reproductive Rights – Lawyers, Guns & Money The answer is named Justice Kennedy.
- Growing mold is not sign that food is good for you, and not growing mold does not mean food is fake.
- Veronica Straszheim — thoughts on the friendzone
- Balkinization: Obergefell and Equality
- “Just” Joking? Sexist Talk in Science
- Valdenia Winn, Kansas state representative: Facing a disciplinary hearing for calling her colleagues “racist.” The complaint was eventually dismissed.
As to those ’25 male privileges’ that “prove” the point, I think the author makes an (unintentionally) strong case for #25.
Speaking of Sean Connery, I saw Hunt For Red October last week for the first time since it was in theaters. Still holds up 100%.
Extra points for putting the “all foreign accents can be rounded down to BBC English (or Scottish for certain bearded exceptions)” trope in full effect.
Ballgame:
#25, for those who don’t recall, is “I can say the most ridiculous things imaginable and people will still think I’m right.”
So you’re talking about an article in which a trans guy is describing sexism he’s noticed since transitioning. Put another way, it’s an article about someone’s personal experiences with sexism against women (even though the author is a man).
And you think this is an example of saying “the most ridiculous things imaginable.”
Comments like that – a non-substantive snark at someone’s personal experiences of sexism against women – are part of why it’s difficult to take your self-identification as a feminist seriously.Deleted because I don’t want to make this about Ballgame. But really, BG, what you wrote wasn’t an argument – it was just snark at the very idea that sexism which harms women exists. (ETA: I’m giving you credit by assuming that it wasn’t transphobic snarking, because I don’t think you’re transphobic, but I could easily imagine a transphobe making the exact same comment about that article.)
ETA: 25 (More) Examples of Male Privilege as Experienced By a Trans Man — Everyday Feminism
Edit: Okay–other people responded to the thing I was going to respond to in the time I took writing this comment. So I’ll just leave my footnote, which amused me:
* The Oxford Comma’s twitter account; the best example of its necessity in some cases
The article on cis folks writing about trans folks does not represent a consensus.
I personally think it’s an irritating argument, though perhaps useful in terms of getting people to question their assumptions.
Amp, I think some of James St. James’s 25 points are plausible experiences of actual male privilege. People think he’s funnier, he’s taken more seriously, and gets away with more. They aren’t as preoccupied with his appearance.
But there are also quite a few points that are ridiculous when construed as “proof” of universal male privilege. They are pure anecdata (and often completely vague and evidence-free anecdata at that). Maybe part of what he’s experiencing does come from just being a man; maybe part of it is because he specifically comes across as a socially dominant or otherwise charismatic man. (It’s also plausible that people were reacting negatively to his ‘gender non-conformance’ vibes when he was living as a woman, and what he’s experiencing now are people’s reactions to someone who is comfortable with his gender role.) There’s a big difference between these things, and we are not given any information to be able to judge which explanation is more compelling. (The explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
The notion that people don’t interrupt men because people don’t (apparently) interrupt JSJ anymore is ridiculous. Interruption is often about subconscious social dominance dynamics, and non-dominant men get interrupted a lot (not infrequently by women).
The notion that his paycheck is “actual, numerical proof” that equally qualified men get more money than equally qualified women working the same jobs is just silly. I’d like to know how, exactly, we’re supposed to think that conversation went. Are we supposed to believe that HR rung him up and told him, “I notice you’re identifying as a man now, JSJ, so we’ll be including a 25% bump in your next paycheck”? Sure.
The notion that men aren’t judged on appearances at work is also silly. Male business attire may be more “practical” but in ways it’s also more constricted than women’s. If JSJ were to try to wear a skirt to work as a man, I suspect he would significantly revise his assertion that people don’t care about men’s appearances on the job.
Some of JSJ’s assertions make me wonder what planet he’s living on, or what drugs he’s taking. Older white guys automatically give him warm smiles and bright eyes and are eager to treat him as a protegé? Is he really claiming that this is men’s typical experience? Really? Male gamers don’t insult or demean other male gamers? Male characters in games aren’t brutalized? Men are never subject to ‘soft’ sexism like being expected to be capable of violence, or occasionally being expected to lift or carry heavy things for women? JSJ thinks men have less sexual liability than women?
Some people may indeed be more likely to swallow any ridiculous thing that JSJ says now that he’s transitioned, but I’m not one of them.
FTR, I posted my previous comment before I saw your deletion. I do appreciate your revision on that score, Amp.
True. My first comment wasn’t an argument, just a bit of rhetorical eye-rolling.
No, not at the notion that anti-female sexism exists. I agree that it does. I was just pointing out that some of the things that JSJ said in that piece were a bit absurd, as my subsequent comment above hopefully clarifies.
Started reading through the links to the studies in #25 “Just” Joking? Sexist Talk in Science. Didn’t take long to notice that the article says:
While the conclusion in the linked Ford and Ferguson study says (emphasis mine):
Sigh.
desipis – While I agree that #25 does an inaccurate job of summarising Ford and Ferguson’s study, your own post above is extremely misleading. You quote the first paragraph in their conclusion where they describe the context in the literature – the sentence you bolded is not their own conclusion but that of the two cited sources. The very next sentence goes on to say: “We have proposed in this article, however, that exposure to disparagement humor does have a negative social consequence.” (emphasis mine), and the very last paragraph in the article states that “our theory identifies disparagement humor as a significant medium for creating a normative climate of tolerance of discrimination”.
So yes, the conclusion reached by Ford and Ferguson is different than what #25 says it is, but it’s a lot closer to it than would appear from the paragraph you quoted.
Eytan, yes that is true. I was mainly trying to make a point about reading comprehension.
Having read through some of the other material, the article seems to be making an argument based on the following points:
1) Reading/hearing sexist jokes alters people’s opinions (in the immediate time after the joke) to make them slightly more-relaxed/less-concerned about the state of gender relations generally, or about a specific hypothetical example of sexist language.
2) Being slightly more-relaxed/less-concerned about sexism/sexist language is factually wrong and/or morally bad; being slightly less-relaxed/more-concerned is factually right and/or morally good.
3) It is morally acceptable to control what people talk/joke about in order to influence their moral/political opinions and thoughts. Therefore, it is acceptable to prevent people from making sexist jokes.
Point 1 appears to be supported by the research. Given that research supports the idea that humour increases creative/divergent thought, it’s perhaps not surprising that humour can, in the immediate term, affect thought processes on the topic the humour focuses on. It’s probably worth noting that I didn’t find any research that suggested the effects of jokes last longer than the length of time it takes to complete a study survey.
Point 2 is where I think it (and the discussions in the research) start to go astray. There is no objectively “correct” way to view the current state of gender relations, nor is there a objectively “correct” level of offensive to have in reaction to sexist language. The language the discussions use seems to be nothing more than an attempt to pathologize conservative political views. The fact that something influences people to shift their political/moral views in a way the author does not like, does not mean it can be objectively described as “a negative social consequence”.
Humour has a positive on creative/divergent thought (from this study):
Thus it is likely to improve, rather than degrade, people’s ability to see different sides to an issue and hence their ability to make moral judgements. Of course, if your goal was to spread a one-sided dogmatic sense of morality, divergent thought on moral issues is something you’d probably see as bad.
Point 3 is where the whole thing becomes rather Orwellian. I’m not sure the argument that people can’t make jokes because it might result in a thought-crime (i.e. not being feminist enough) is an argument compatible with a free/liberal/tolerant society.
A significant part of the rest of the article talks about sexual harassment standards without acknowledging the important difference between a minor isolated event and the way a recurring pattern of behaviour can create a hostile environment, or how that distinction is important in the context, as in Hunt’s case we’re talking about a single incident. Nor does the article acknowledge how harshly and publicly chastising someone for something can also be an example of workplace harassment.
LSU Prof Fired for Telling Jokes Is Latest Victim of College Anti-Sex Hysteria.
Interesting and disturbing story, desipis. From the link:
It seems to me there’s another very important factor to blame: the increasing share of teaching which is handled by non-tenured professors. Wouldn’t a tenured professor be protected from absurdities like being dismissed for using profanity in a class filled with adults?
ballgame says:
As we’ve learned, it doesn’t protect you from going through the Title IX Kangaroo Court ringer.
That reason.com post linked to another, commenting on This everydayfeminism.com post:
The accompanying photo captures my reaction to it exactly.
I’m not sure that’s in fact what we’ve learned, LTL FTC. Laura Kipnis, after all, may have been investigated, but she was eventually cleared. I think — at a minimum — being tenured protects teachers from casual ‘we don’t think what you did was wrong but it’s just a hell of a lot easier to get rid of you than defend you or give you due process’ dismissals, which is what appears to me to be what happened to that LSU professor.
Reading between the lines of this piece from The Advocate, “LSU breaks its silence on fired professor,” it seems clear that the charges of sexual impropriety brought against Buchanan were a proxy for something else:
***
***
“Why Are SSM Rights Doing Better Than Reproductive Rights – Lawyers, Guns & Money ”
So many unexamined assumptions and less than dealt with facts in his article.
The easy answers seem to be things like:
Public Opinion hasn’t changed much on abortion, but it has on Same-Sex Marriage;
Abortion started off with a Supreme Court Opinion that was well ‘ahead’ of public opinion (from the progressive interpretation) and has reverted more toward public opinion while the court opinion on SSM is at best even with public opinion and perhaps behind;
Abortion has conflicting concrete values (rights of the woman over her body, and the right of the fetus to live) that draw into sharp distinctions well before NARAL is willing to admit (and NARAL shapes the political actions of the Democratic side of the debate more than the similarly out-of-touch-from-public-opinion pro-life extremists shape the Republican side), while SSM has conflicting concrete rights with incredibly diffuse and hard to identify harms alleged against straight marriages;
Reproductive rights (outside from abortion) have done amazingly well, especially recently, so it isn’t even clear that SSM is doing ‘better’. Contraception for poor people is broadly available through Obamacare plans, and is set up to become more and more available as the plans used more widely. Basic contraception rights are so widely accepted that to find back-tracking you have to reach for things like RU-486, which has still drawn VERY broad use in the last 10 years. A lot of his complaints seem to be artifacts of starting from a much higher base (it is harder to grow from a higher base than from a lower one, see Chinese economic growth vs. the US, while China still is decades from catching up).
Further to the extent that the argument hinges on abortion rights, maybe his definition shouldn’t be ‘doing better’. From my perspective, and the perspective of a huge majority of the US public, the end state of the abortion wars should look a lot more like France or Sweden or Denmark or Germany. This is especially true as more health care becomes government run or mediated under Obamacare. Scott would view movements in that direction as being ‘worse’ than where we already are. Perhaps he is just wrong about what progress should be going toward on something.
Great link, Richard. But I strongly disagree with this:
There was little actual evidence presented by the university that there was anything else that would have merited dismissal in the absence of the dubious notion that using profanity around adults constitutes “harassment.” A more accurate wording would be, ‘It seems clear that university spokesperson Ernie Ballard would like people to believe there was something more going on that might justify the administration having exceeded the faculty committee’s recommendation that Teresa Buchanan be censured but retained, though Ernie provided no actual evidence to substantiate this claim.’
Given the evidence at hand, and your position as a faculty person, Richard, don’t you find Teresa’s dismissal to be deeply disturbing?
Holy fuck, LTL FTC, she was tenured!
Ballgame,
Of course I find Buchanan’s dismissal disturbing, whether it was because of issues in the teacher-training program—which I have read elsewhere, though I can’t now find the link, had led to complaints by the school districts involved to the university’s Board of Trustees—or because of the supposed sexual improprieties. But precisely because I have some experience with how these things go, I am reluctant to conclude that the sole factor here was the university’s spineless capitulation to some students’ squeamishness about her using some profanities in class and making some sexual jokes.
I don’t mean by this that their reasons for firing her are any less disturbing—and I want to be clear that I am not in any way suggesting the university had grounds for setting aside the recommendations of the faculty committee—I just mean that it seems to me likely that the university is using the so-called “anti-sex hysteria” referred to in the title of the piece desipis linked to to pursue a larger, also disturbing, agenda.
At my own school, for example, which is an open-admissions community college, the Board of Trustees has apparently been getting complaints that we are/have become an elitist institution because our standards make it too hard for people to graduate. One BOT member, at a recent meeting, even used the fact that his “brilliant” son was unable to pass the math course he needed in order to graduate as evidence. That complaint is the source of several conflicts between the BOT and faculty here in which the BOT is trying its damnedest to erode faculty governance, take the setting of standards out our hands, and more.
You are, of course, getting a faculty member’s version here; and I’m not really interested in trying to lay out the two sides of the conflict. My point is that it’s pretty clear that BOT and administration are using this issue of elitism and the difficulty of graduating to pursue a larger agenda. Similarly, given the small hints about the teacher training program in what I’ve read about Buchanan’s case, it would not surprise me to learn that getting rid of her serves a larger purpose than making LSU “a harassment-free zone” or whatever.
RJN:
I see nothing in ballgame’s comment to suggest that he has so concluded, or that he thinks you should so conclude.
Rather I think he is reacting to your earlier remark
which suggest that far from being “reluctant” to reach a conclusion, you had in fact, reached one.
I find that argument frustrating because it leads to the conclusion that each person has one story they can tell: Their own autobiography. Literally anything else involves trying to imagine the experiences of people other than yourself.
It also leads to the conclusion that white male cis hetero artists should make all their protagonists white, male, hetero and cis, which, let me tell you, stories which revolve around white cis hetero males are super popular in the left-leaning blogosphere.
I find a lot of criticism about representation frustrating because it asks artists to navigate these left-wing channels, trying to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of Appropriation/Telling Stories That Aren’t Your Own on the one side, and Erasure/Tokenism on the other, without much real guidance about how to actually do things successfully.
Usually what advice there is is just “Sail right into Scylla and let her dogs heads eat you.”
I mean, I’m a white cis hetero man struggling with depression and midlife crisis. I’ll write lots of stories about that, with some trans people as secondary characters who are mostly there to illuminate my white cis main character’s struggles. That will surely go over really really well on left-wing Tumblrs and blogs.
Look, all those words I capitalized three paragraphs back are real things, but I feel like there’s very little out there explaining how an artist can productively avoid/deal with them.
Christopher–fair. I’ve written about it some.
The seminal text is Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. It’s a bit 101 but a place to start.
Fwiw, I like stories about white cis Herero males fine. I just like other stuff too. And sometimes I max out on something, like zombies, or having every protagonist be a Wchm.
Will mcintosh has some lovely Wchm stories.
Christopher, did you actually read the post I linked? Because this seems like an incredibly unfair take on it.
@Christopher —
I’m not telling you what you can and cannot write. I do not have that power.
But at the same time, you cannot tell me what to read, nor how to feel about what I read, nor how to respond to cis people who write transphobic things. You cannot stop me for critiquing your work for being transphobic, nor sharing that opinion with others, nor letting that opinion loose into the marketplace of opinion. You cannot avoid the implications of what you do when you write about me.
Furthermore, I am not responsible for inventing a toothless definition of “transphobia” that removes all inconveniences for cis writers. If I had to power to shape what transphobia was, I would simply eliminate it entirely. Then none of is would this problem and I would go dancing tonight free of abuse.
But transphobia exists. And that limits both of us.
But it limits me quite a lot more. Wanna trade burdens?
Probably not, right. And even if you did, we cannot. I cannot be a cis dude grumbling about social justice critiques of my writing. You cannot be authentically trans. (Unless you are trans and have yet to figure it out. That happens sometimes.)
In any event, my point is this: you cannot write a novel like Nevada. Sorry, you just cannot. You do not have the lived experiences, nor the deep insight into the contours of trans experience. Thus you cannot absorb trans discourse from a subjective place, and through years of experience internalize its contradictions. Thus when you dig deep to find creative truths about trans experience, things that are not cliché, you will find your well empty.
On the other hand, you might try anyhow. You might dredge your creative well until you come up with something, which will be a mishmash of your own sexual and gender preoccupations, alongside deeply held, lingering clichés you’ve acquired about trans folks from a lifetime of consuming media by other cisgendered writers (who did the same thing as you, back through time, cycle upon cycle).
But bravely you carry on, and thus you produce another Hedwig (if you’re good enough).
— to which trans people loudly object.
And then the poor, benighted cis author cries out, “Oh heavens, social injustice is sure inconvenient to my writing career.”
Yep. Social injustice is indeed that.
tl;dr I’m not telling you what to write. I’m telling you what happens when you try to write about me.
So choose. Then own what you write.
Truth and insight are valid reasons to critique a work, as is accuracy, as is the social vulnerability of the subjects, as are many thing.
I’m glad I am trans. It has taught me so much.
Because this blog has often considered the concerns of male rape victims, and the question of the prevalence of female perpetrators, I thought there might be interest in this article:
“Why Female Prison Employees May Risk Having Sexual Relationships With Inmates”
This quote was thought-provoking for me: “Gender appeared to play some kind of role in the nature of the banned relationships, as 84 percent of the relationships that female staffers had with inmates “appeared to be willing,” whereas only 37 percent of the relationships between male guards and inmates qualified as such, according to the report. ”
Obviously the larger cultural narrative that tells men “you should always be into having sex, you should never be a victim” is likely to be in play here in terms of how male inmates report their experiences, but in any case, this illustrates how, especially in an institutional setting, there can be multiple power dynamics (gender, race, age, institutionalized person/worker, worker’s power in the institutional system overall) that make it complicated to figure out “who is being exploited and how?” and “how can we prevent further exploitation of this type?” and “how can we care for those who have been exploited?” Lots for me to chew on, anyhow.
tl;dr I’m not telling you what to write. I’m telling you what happens when you try to write about me.
Yeah, I know you aren’t telling me what to write, I got that, and I’m not even saying it’s a wrong approach.
Here’s my tl;dr:
I’m telling you what happens to people who write the way you want them to.
Right? I write a story about a tortured middle aged white male, with some minority characters who are largely safe, stable, and thus peripheral to the narrative. The strangeness and emotional growth is centered around yet another privileged white male.
And voila! I’m erasing the experiences of the non-privileged by marginalizing them in my text. I’m engaging in tokenism by including non-privileged groups just to include them. And doesn’t their depiction come close to the cliche of the “Noble Savage” or the “Magical Negro”? And why, when there is such a glut of privileged protagonists, do we need another whiny white hetero male having a midlife crisis?
And then when I say, “Well, wait, how do I sail between those poles and actually get this right?”
Well of course that’s just whining. I just want to be free of criticism because, DUH, you avoid these issues by telling bold, interesting stories centered around non-privileged protagonists in novel situations, and why should that be so hard for you to do?
Man, can you believe people stress out over this when it’s so easy to get it right?
And back and forth we go, between Scylla and Charybdis.
I thought I was pretty clear about saying everything I talked about was a legitimate risk, and I think the obvious strategies for avoiding one side tend to lead to the problems of the other side.
Interestingly, Elusis, male inmate victims of sexual misconduct by exclusively female staff still outnumber female inmate victims of sexual misconduct by exclusively male staff by a ratio of more than 3.7 to 1 even if you throw out all of the ostensibly “appeared to be willing” cases.
Aren’t there more than 10 times as many male prisoners as female prisoners, ballgame?
I don’t think Veronica was saying “cis writers should never write a tortured protagonist who is trans.” If I understand her argument, I don’t think she’d have any inherent objection to me (I am cis) writing a graphic novel in which the main character, who is trans, was a misunderstood and difficult to deal with cartoonist struggling to create the Great American Comic Strip, and the main issue of the graphic novel was the struggle to create art with integrity in a commercialized environment.
As I read it, Veronica is saying that it’s fine for cis creators to include trans characters, including as protagonists, as long as we do the research and avoid anti-trans tropes.
However, Veronica is also saying that it would be a bad idea for cis me to write a graphic novel with a trans protagonist, in which the novel’s primary conflict was about the internal struggles of being a trans person. She’s saying the odds are I as a cis writer am unlikely to say anything about the internal struggles of being a trans person that is both original and true. (If I’ve understood Veronica correctly.)
That’s something that you might still disagree with, of course. But it’s not the same argument, as the one you’ve been arguing against.
I don’t know, but that ratio seems plausible, Jake Squid.
So if there is a greater than 10 to 1 ratio of male to female prisoners what does that mean for the 3.7 to 1 ratio you mentioned?
Veronica, I’ve had trans people specifically ask me to write trans characters. Actually, it was the first request I heard, and the reasoning behind it, that made me feel it was especially necessary to do so. Will I write about their difficulties with being trans specifically? Unsure at this point, though in at least one case, probably. And likely in other cases, no.
My well is not empty. Part of writing includes drawing from ones own experience to understand others (and research. Lots of research.) I’m super uncomfortable in the gender binary, but I’m not trans (and don’t identify as gender fluid because I can cram myself into the binary even if it’s inhibitive.)
Andy Duncan is not a woman yet writes women with deep empathy. So does Stephen Sondheim. So does Barry. Ken Liu, Dale Bailey… I’m really tired right now or I’d write more.
—
Christopher, seriously, Writing the Other by Shawl and Ward. It might help relax some of your stress.
Also, Christopher, do you have any axes of difference? Like class, disability, neuroa typicality, regional stigma, stigmatized religious beliefs or ethnicity, there’s lots to choose from. Many, many writers have mood disorders in particular. If you do fall on one of those axes, it’s an easy access point to consider others.
If not, you can still get there. Might be slightly harder to find the access but it is doable.
I know very few if any people who aren’t underrepresented on some axis. (Maybe some of my husbands coworkers.) Class especially so often and harmfully gets left out of these discussions.
I feel I should clarify actually. I’m not arguing that I’d write the seminal book/story on trans issues. A trans person will do that.
But I think I could still produce work of interest, that isn’t hedwig, that isn’t an empty well. I could write (I feel) a useful entry in the conversation. The best? No. But there’s huge daylight, to me, between saying the best work will probably be lived, and that anything else is a dry well. Good things are as necessary as perfect things, especially if we’re talking about changing narratives, raising awareness, and representation.
And the trans population is small. I’m not going to lay at their feet the entire burden of producing sufficiently good pieces. It’s just not statistically possible. Many stories need to be told and reinforced for change to occur through exposure to the idea that trans people are human.
@Ampersand —
This is precisely what I am saying. In fact, I feel as if people are not reading my actual words, but instead are arguing with someone who is not me.
(Which actually, if you’ll permit me to play gotcha — if someone cannot even bother to understand what I am saying about this, what chance is there they will understand the really tricky stuff about being trans?)
Anyway!
There is one more thing: it is not only that you lack the experience of being trans. It is also that you do not understand the day to day of living under transphobia and transmisogyny. Thus you will not be directly sensitive to the full meaning of these topics, as they affect trans people.
Look, a man could not write the Vagina Monologs. It’s not only that he has never had a vagina, and that he has never menstruated — although these facts matter — but it is also that he has not lived his life in a culture that devalues and degrades his body. There are limits on how sensitive he can be to misogyny.
He can understand this intellectually, but if he wants to push boundaries and talk about vaginas in a really blunt way, revealing the contradictions and the seldom mentioned unpleasant facts, in a world that calls vaginas gross, and if his main sources of knowledge are some articles he read, and that his wife complains about her periods, and his imagination —
— well, try it guys. See how women react.
Does this mean you cannot write about women?
Of course not, OMG why on earth would you think that? Stop being silly.
Anyway, yes please, include trans characters.
Please include trans characters. You can even have a trans protagonist — although treat that as a significant challenge.
But understand, you are not a trans writer. You are not going to say new things about transness — at best you can repeat what we have told you, insofar as you understood it.
But please also be aware that cis people routinely include us to be “edgy,” or to treat us as empty vessels to hold their weird gender preoccupations. So we become freaks and perverts — when we are not literal monsters.
But here is the thing, sometimes we are freaks and perverts. Who here thinks they can explore that fact?
Anyway, this stuff is commonplace, and indeed it is a deep injustice committed against us. It hurts us. It took from me so much, that I cannot even express.
It literally kills us. It kills us the same way clinical depression kills people.
Anyway, final note, read this: Rise of the Gender Novel.
“But understand, you are not a trans writer. You are not going to say new things about transness — at best you can repeat what we have told you, insofar as you understood it.”
While I can see why you think a cis person could write about trans people, I can’t see why you think they would want to. I don’t know many writers who aspire to be nothing but megaphones for other people’s ideas.
Veronica –
I’m glad that I understood your argument correctly; as you know, I’m a fan of your blog.
If by “people” you mean people here – “people” being plural – then I think you’re being a little unfair. I think Christopher misread you badly. but Mandolin seems to have read you correctly.
* * *
I’d put it like this: It’s not that cis/straight/male/middle-class/white/ablebodied writers can’t write about ______, but that it’s a really difficult thing to do well. A sufficiently talented, empathic, and hardworking writer could make it work. But it might not be something that every writer should try.
I’m going to continue to write characters, including protagonists, that aren’t like me. But there are some things I’m not going to attempt, because I think they’re not within my skill and experience set. For example, I will probably never write a book in which the protagonist speaks in African American English Vernacular, because it’s not my native vernacular, and I don’t have the ear or the skill to successfully emulate that, not even if I work hard.
There are definitely some non-black writers who could successfully write a protagonist who speaks and thinks in AAEV. But it’s a difficult challenge for a non-black writer, and it’s okay for writers to decide that they’re not up for that particular challenge. Most of the writers who do it well are going to be Black.
* * *
Tamme wrote:
Because even if I’m not bringing any new ideas about transness to the table, that doesn’t mean that I won’t bring anything new at all.
From a song from the musical Sunday in the Park With George:
Veronica wrote:
This, for me, gets at the crux of the matter. To take Veronica’s Vagina Monologues example. I’m not so sure a cis man couldn’t write a Vagina Monologues and have it be convincing in all the ways Veronica suggests it would not. The determining question would be, or at least one determining question would be, why does he want to do this? What is his stake for him in telling those particular stories? (Or, to put it another way, what does he have to lose if he doesn’t?) If it is, simply, to be edgy, then I have no doubt he will produce something with all faults Veronica lists. If it is out of a sense of self-righteous and self-indulgent progressiveness, the same would hold. And so on.
If, on the other hand, what’s at stake for him requires “getting it right”—which would assume a willingness to confront all the ways in which he could get it all wrong—then I don’t see why it’s impossible. Certainly he would produce a very different work than Eve Ensler did, and certainly he could still, despite doing everything right, get a whole lot wrong, but to suggest that he couldn’t get it right is to essentialize experience in a way that I think is ultimately troubling.
@Ampersand: Of course you can bring new ideas that aren’t related to trans-ness, but if that’s your goal, why rope trans people into it? The risk is high, and the reward is zero.
I’m not persuaded. However, I don’t think my further contributions are useful, so I’ll duck out. Thank you, Veronica, for engaging.
However, Veronica is also saying that it would be a bad idea for cis me to write a graphic novel with a trans protagonist, in which the novel’s primary conflict was about the internal struggles of being a trans person. She’s saying the odds are I as a cis writer am unlikely to say anything about the internal struggles of being a trans person that is both original and true. (If I’ve understood Veronica correctly.)
This is a fair criticism of what I wrote, but here’s what I keep coming back to:
If a person writes a story that includes non-privileged people, but doesn’t discuss or include the struggles that come with lack of privilege, (Especially when we deal with stories set in contemporary times) doesn’t that smack of Tokenism and Erasure?
Or are those things meaningless criticisms?
Or have I simply completely misunderstood what Erasure and Tokenism are?
Thanks, RJN, this is a nice way of putting this.
Christopher:
I can’t speak to trans experience, so I won’t. But with my Queer Person hat on*, I can talk about what I want from stories that have queer people in them.
You can’t write queer people as if they were straight people who just happen to be dating someone of the same sex (or wanting to do that) and have it be truthful. But it’s extremely limiting to art and to people’s lives, I think, to assume that that difference must be the primary issue in every story you tell about a queer person.
I’m queer. It’s always important to what I’m doing that I’m queer: that impacts the way I interact with people, even if I’m not interested in them, and it impacts how I think about things too, etc. But not everything that happens to me is primarily about the fact that I’m queer. A story about me meeting a work deadline would be different than a story about a straight person meeting a work deadline, but it’s still not a story about how I’m queer!…and then maybe some other incidental work things. And while I really like media that’s about queerness as its primary topic, I also like stories that have people like me doing stuff that’s not about how they’re queer. Like, I’m a science fiction fan, I like stories about queer people saving the universe in addition to stories about coming out or self-realization. In fact, I was craving that kind of story, back when stories primarily about queerness were the only kinds of stories involving queer people that you could find (well, those or the ones where we were the villains, but anyway…). It’s important to me that both kinds of stories exist: that there are stories that deeply explore the queer experience, but also stories where people like me do ordinary things.
There’s also an aspect of writing quality to tokenism, too. The more three-dimensional the character, the less they seem like a token. And a lot of that comes down to listening to other people from that group, as Veronica and Amp have been (partially) discussing–to being humble in the face of what you think you know and what you still need to learn.
One difference between queer stories in mainstream culture and trans stories in mainstream culture is that it’s relatively easy these days to find diverse queer narratives written by queer people, and trans narratives by trans people are rarer and harder to find. The research barrier for non-trans writers interested in writing a trans characters is much higher–and the stuff you find tends to be a particular type of narrative, too, due to what gets bought and promoted. (I’m sure, of course, that there are other differences I do not know about or have not mentioned.)
*it is a very attractive hat
What it means, Jake Squid, is that in absolute numbers the phenomenon of ‘female prison staffers sexually abusing male inmates’ is much, much larger than the phenomenon of ‘male prison staffers abusing female inmates’ even if you fully incorporate the ‘appeared to be willing’ discount that Elusis introduced above (an issue to which I’ll return).
Now, you’re pointing out an additional layer of complexity by noting that the underlying gender ratio of the incarcerated population is skewed about 10 to 1 in ‘favor’ of men. That’s an important context, sure. But let’s not stop there. After all, what accounts for such a skewed gender ratio in our inmate population in the first place?
Part of that is difficult to answer with precision, of course, but is no doubt related to the ways the gender oppression of males drives them to commit more crimes. But part of it is also due to the enormous female privilege of being granted greater leniency during every step of the prosecution, as uncovered by this paper by Sonja Starr:
(Many here are no doubt familiar with this study, since Amp himself covered it last year.)
But returning to the whole issue of the “appeared to be willing” threshold, I think it’s important to bear in mind the shaky nature of that threshold — which even Elusis noted — given the gender pressures on men to ‘always be up for sex (with women)’ and to never be seen as a victim, pressures which I suspect are even stronger in the extremely harsh male dominance hierarchies inside prisons.
Plus, we should bear in mind that regardless of whether or not an inmate “appears to be willing” to have sex with a prison staffer, that staffer is still guilty of sexual misconduct. For what I presume are obvious reasons, it is illegal for prison staffers to have sex with inmates, “willing” or not. (At least on the federal level, I’m guessing this is true with most other levels of jurisdiction as well.)
If you don’t apply the “appeared to be willing” discount, you’ll find that the ratio of ‘male inmates victimized by female staffers’ to ‘female inmates victimized by male staffers’ is 14.7 to 1.
I think that people can successfully write characters and perspectives which they have not lived. I’m thinking right now of Molly Grue, from Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. That character rang completely true for a lot of women (which Beagle knows because they have written to him) and not just true, but true in a visceral and poignant way; not merely authentically well-done, but actually artistically articulating a part of their own lived experience which they had not put into words. I heard an interview with Beagle, once, in which he was asked how he did that. And he said that he had no idea. He said that Molly Grue was “a gift”, that at the time he wrote her he was a callow youth without the necessary life experience to write her.
Then again, The Last Unicorn is an extraordinary book. Unique, even considering that it was written by an extraordinary author. In the absence of divine gifts, we must rely upon hard work.
Which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin:
Writing is work. If you want to write well, you have to work hard, and be willing to acknowledge that most of the time, your first attempts and your early attempts will be inferior.
So, you want to write trans characters well? You probably can. But there’s a price to pay. You have to pay for that knowledge and ability, in time and effort. You have to “pay your dues”, not in the sense of sending a check to the organization, but working hard for a long time with little immediate reward.
Helen Boyd is married to a trans woman, and she wrote two superb books about gender, which is one of the most complex and slippery topics there is. I would trust her to write good trans characters, even great ones.
But not before she paid her dues. She wrote an account about her wife, Betty, pre-transition. Helen needed shoes, and so she went into a shoe store and bought them. Betty became very upset, and Helen could not initially understand why. Shopping is a pain in the rear. They’re shoes. You go into the store, you buy them, you leave, you put them on when you need to. What’s the big deal?
But for Betty, it was forbidden territory. She wanted to be able to go into the store and be acknowledged as a woman, try on shoes, talk about them with nearby women, look at this or that, take her time… be a woman among women.
For Helen, who is not a standard woman herself, buying shoes was a chore. For Betty, not being able to buy shoes in that way was just another punch in the gut. It wasn’t the shoes, per se. It was the exclusion, the social dysphoria, society’s “Ha, ha! Neener, neener, you can’t have this, and if you try, we have ten thousand ways to punish you.” It was the anxiety, the disconnect, society’s denial of Betty’s self, and Betty’s own learned self-denial to avoid the ridicule, the looks, the scorn, the rejection.
And here’s the thing: Helen knows this now, she gets it now, but it puzzled her at the time. She had to figure it out, to learn it, to learn to inhabit it.
Now, I am not a shoe person. I have more shoes than the rest of my family combined, but that’s for other reasons; practically speaking, I’ll buy the shoe for the job and wear it, much like Helen.
But when I read that scene, I understood instantly what Betty was going through. My reaction was not “wtf?”, it was “Oh, Betty. I’m so sorry. Yeah.”
Because I had paid my dues already. I didn’t have to gnaw on it until I understood it; it had already gnawed on me, and I already bore the imprint of those teeth. And so I understood, without thinking, that it was never about the shoes.
It’s not that cis people have to pay dues and trans people get in free. It’s that trans people have already paid the dues.
I would trust Mandolin and Ampersand to write trans characters well. Mandolin has given some resources, and I’m not familiar with them, but I expect that they would help a lot. I’m confident that if she wrote a trans character, she’d also error-check it by running it past some trusted trans people. I know that Ampersand would, because he has done it with me.
I think that people can write outside of their experience. White Americans can write Black Americans, Americans can write Poles, or Mexicans, men can write women, women can write men, civilians can write cops. But the chance that they will get it wrong is basically 100% until they do their homework. Some groups require more homework than others. I think trans people probably are among the most difficult to write authentically, but that’s not to say that other groups are easy. It’s a matter of hard, and harder.
I was talking recently, semi-professionally, with a lesbian therapist I know. We were talking about how her colleagues served trans people in domestic violence crisis situations. I mentioned that good intentions and open hearts aren’t enough; loving people can say ignorant things which lose them the trust of their clients and correctly so, because they betray a wrong understanding. She objected genially that she thought she would do pretty well. And I told her that she would absolutely make mistakes until she understood the right framework. I asked her how she would feel if she and her wife went to couples therapy, and the therapist asked, “Okay, who’s the man, and who’s the woman?” And she got it, immediately and totally. Because she’s lived the experience of people trying to comprehend her relationship through that common and very incorrect framework.
That’s what writers will do with any topic they don’t know well enough; they’ll mis-frame it. The mis-framing will be obvious to people who know the topic even when it’s not the point of the story.
It’s what I will do, until I’ve done the work. It’s what you will do. Until you have done enough homework (which often entails difficult personal work on yourself, by the way) to find the right frame.
—
Finally, Christopher has articulated a difficult tightrope to walk, in which it seems inevitable that no matter what you do, someone will tell you that you’ve done it wrong, that’s a no-win scenario.
Yes. It is.
And, speaking as a trans woman and also as a woman, full stop: that tightrope feels very familiar to me. Julia Serano said it well:
So, I don’t mean to be flip or dismissive, but yeah. You’re going to take flak. Welcome to my world. The only way to negotiate that tightrope is to be willing to take the flak, and to learn whose flak is worth your attention (which is not the same as saying that it’s easy to ignore the other flak, because it’s not; that shit still hits you). Where you give your attention is your choice, but let me suggest that if you want to improve your writing, you pay attention to the flak from the people who belong to the same group you’re taking the flak for writing about.
Grace
You’re right that “essentializing” is bad, which is why I presented the question the way I did. I said, “try it guys. See how women react.”
I am not talking about some imaginary man who could exist in theory. I’m talking to actual men.
I am not talking about what could happen. I am talking about what does happen.
When cis people write about trans people, they get it wrong. In fact, they get it wrong almost uniformly, even among otherwise very good writers. There has to be a reason for this.
#####
@Ampersand’s example of AAVE is a good one. It is not that white people absolutely cannot understand AAVE, but very few ever will, because deeply understanding a culture takes an enormous investment. Should a writer make understanding this one culture a full time job?
After all, maybe they want their next character to be Japanese.
I can see a white author taking the time to learn some AAVE, and then to include it in dialog. I mean, don’t over do it. Use a light tough. But that can surely be done.
In fact, I think you should do that, invest that effort, work both to include diverse people and to get it right.
But a first-person novel written from a black person’s perspective, written deeply informed by AAVE? If you are a white person who grew up in the ’burbs, how would you acquire the insight to do that?
Honestly, you probably cannot. Black people (some of them) can. Such stories deserve to be told. You won’t produce it.
Sorry, you just won’t. You are limited.
#####
Let me get concrete. I hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That movie hurt me.
This is hard to explain.
No, it’s really hard to explain. It’s hard to explain even in my own mind, to myself. It is hard to take those long-ago feelings, all those fragments and glimpses of memory, and to structure them so they make sense.
Back then, I had no idea I was trans. But I knew I wished I was a girl. And I knew Frank was a weirdo freak who made me hate myself, cuz is that me?
What I just wrote is true, but it feels like such an enormous simplification of the full body of feelings. The fact is, I might never be able to put this into words, like in essay form.
But on the other hand, maybe that is okay. Does this need to be an essay? Does it need to fully make sense? Is not simply feeling it enough?
So here is the funny thing: this response to Rocky Horror is pretty common among trans women. Actually, it seems very common. It is one of those things that comes up, again and again, and so many times we respond “OMG! You too! Right! Remember that!”
There is this excitement that comes from a sudden realization of deep commonality.
On the other hand, I know a few trans women who enjoy Rocky Horror.
Which, of course such women exist. It is not as if we have a single hive-mind.
#####
But beating up on Rocky Horror is not my point. My point is this: how many of you, dear cis people, would have imagined this situation?
In my experience, very few of you.
It happens like this: from time to time a cis person will bring up Rocky Horror, cuz of course they are super open-minded liberal folks, and they are totes cool with queer stuff, and they freaking-loved Rocky Horror, and that is sorta like a trans thing, right? So naturally I must like it and the fact they like it is just sooooo totes cool, right? I get this a lot.
Anyway, yes, I like the music in Rocky Horror, but no, I don’t like the movie, and I don’t want to watch it with you, and maybe we can change the subject.
In my experience, cis people are surprised that I hate that movie. They often demand an explanation from me.
#####
If you are a writer, and if your current work contains a trans character, and if that character grew up in the contemporary era, then they have an opinion on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There is a good chance that this opinion is complex.
Or if not Rocky Horror, then something else. That’s fine. That one movie is not the point. It is just one example of a bigger phenomena.
There is no single trans narrative, but it’s uncanny how many common patterns we find. If you are trans, then you have directly experienced this, when you talk to other trans people.
So a question to cis people: how many hundreds of hours have you spend in deep, intimate conversation with trans folks, about the weird contours of our lives?
I mean, for myself, literally every moment of internal monologue I have is with a trans person. But more, most of my friends are trans. We talk, and when we do, we talk in a shared context that is deeply intimate. My girlfriend is a trans woman. My best friend is a trans woman. My next two “best friends” (not that I rank them exactly) are trans women. Most of my online friends are trans women. We say things among ourselves that we do not say to cis people.
Well, we don’t usually say these things to cis people. Have we said them to you?
#####
Okay, so now you know about my feelings toward Rocky Horror. Furthermore you know that this is a somewhat common thing. It is not unique to me. If you write a trans character, you can include this as a detail in their life.
Maybe. Or you can leave it out. There is no reason you should mention that movie in your story.
But your story will have stuff, and if you want your character to feel inhabited, you will have to kinda guess how they respond to things, how they feel, the baggage they carry, like perhaps their weird feelings about their genitals — or maybe the fact they are totally fine with their genitals. That happens also.
Sort of. Sometimes I am okay with my genitals. Sometimes I am not.
This is common enough, and now you know that. Another isolated fact you can try to put into a character.
Or not. Some trans people end up in the hospital after they took a belt sander to their junk.
Which, by the way, horrifies me.
Myself, I’ve never met anyone who did anything so dramatic to their junk. But on the other hand, the relationship my g/f has to her junk — it literally scares me.
And I’m not going to try to explain that. I might put something like it in a story someday.
You, dear cis person, probably should not.
#####
When you write a trans character, you can repeat what we have told you. But that is not enough, since for your character to feel inhabited, you need to internalize them, you need to know them not as isolated facts repeated from stuff you’ve read, but as an integrated person.
So you dig and you try to find the character. And what happens? You find gross transphobic clichés.
No really, you do! Sorry. That stuff is so baked into our culture that you cannot avoid it.
“Not me!” you should. “I am some magic unicorn person who never internalized and social transphobia.”
Bah. No you’re not. Just stop.
So you accept you have a ton of preconceptions about gender and trans folks. Fine. So edit that stuff out.
But you are seeking an integrated character, and this process is often unconscious. Which is to say, your conscious, symbol-manipulating mind hasn’t the bandwidth to build a person. It has to happen spontaneously in your unconscious, which is an enormous transphobic stew.
Or else accept the transphobic stuff. After all, this is a discourse and a dialectic. You push boundaries, take risks.
You take risks, right?
After all, maybe the transph0bic thing is actually true.
But how would you know that it is true?
Veronica,
Thanks for that reply. I learned things from it. But I also want to point out that I was, overall, agreeing with your argument. (Or at least intending to.) The paragraph you quoted was in response to this generalization:
I agree that the odds are against a man being able to write such a work, but I don’t think it’s impossible in the way that generalization makes it sound.
Unrelatedly, I think I might have to start identifying as genderqueer. I find myself increasingly jealous of people who do in a way that suggests to me that I’m not processing my feelings very well. It’s the same process I went through trying to figure out whether to claim/admit queerness and disability. Its a weird imposter syndrome thing even though by an objective standard I am clearly both queer and disabled.
Wasn’t Rocky Horror written by a trans woman?
Richard O’Brien has self-identified as non-binary, but not as a transwoman.
Eytan: Identifies, present tense.
Ben – sorry, you’re right – I had originally said “in interviews”, then removed that but did not change the tense accordingly.
Mandolin–Definitely something to listen to there. In the years I was processing whether to come out as a trans man, I had a lot of jealousy of transitioning and post-transition guys. It was surprising and very intense, and turned out to be one of my best early signals that transition to male was the direction for me.
Mazel tov on your ongoing journey. :)
Something I felt was missing from this discussion was the place of editors, especially subject/identity expert editors.
For example, I’m working on a piece right now where the protagonist is a queer Chinese(-American(-on the moon)) woman. I am none of those things! So an important part of my process is going to be getting early drafts in front of Chinese people, and queer people, and women, and saying, “hey, what am I missing? Where am I off base?”
Now, it’s my text, and I don’t imagine that friendly feedback will enable me to write something groundbreaking about the queer Chinese(-American(-on the moon)) experience. But, while I expect that I’m fucking up (a lot!) in my first draft, I don’t have to be married to it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/sexual-assault-poll/
The title: “One in 5 women say they have been sexually assaulted in college” is slightly misleading. It’s one in 5 female current and former college students were assaulted in college, not one in five of the entire female population. For male current and former student, the figure is one in 20.
Note also that “sexual assault” is more broadly defined than other studies and includes such incidents as groping. There is no way to isolate “rape and attempted rape”
I also agree with the criticisms of the survey methodology including the following observation:
One preconceived definition is the gender-traditionalist idea that sexual assault is “violence against women”, resulting in a greater suppression of the prevalence estimate for men than for women.
Erl: Agreed on all points. (The subject is discussed in the book I recommended which again is Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, since I feel I can’t mention it enough.)
One thing you don’t mention is that there are proper and improper ways to approach someone from a disadvantaged group for their expertise. Remember they are people doing you a favor. If they’re a peer you work with all the time, you probably don’t need to do anything special. If they’re another writer you don’t know well, offer reciprocation. If you don’t know them, ask politely, be ready to accept a no, and take them out for a meal or a drink.
Also, remember not all folks are experts/interested in discussing the subject of their minority status. If I go bother N. K. Jemisin, I know race is something she’s interested in and expert on. A different black friend might not find race interesting as a topic, and may not be up on all the sociology, etc. They can still speak to you on the subject with a great deal more information than you have, but it’s better (IMO) to approach people who have an interest in anti-racism/feminism/disiability activism, what have you. (Non-writers are fine critique partners, especially for a conversation like this, and can often offer perspectives on craft that differ from what writers give you.)
Regarding #1, Vox’s take on the Greek economic crisis –
An essay by Victor Davis Hanson on the decreasing respect for the rule of law in the U.S. and it’s effects on America gives Greece as an example of the end point that takes you to. It has this quote about what effect any agreement reached will have in Greece:
I would add, “and if you think that a social model that believes that people can retire at the age of 50 or 55 and get 80% of their salary for the rest of their lives from the government, paid for by the people who are still working and being productive, is going to work.”
This is about a week old, but I hadn’t seen it before: a nice BuzzFeed video on privilege.
Groping women force barmen to give up kilts.
I’m not one to buy into the whole “librul media” shtick, but the ideological spin introduced in the
editingrewrite of this previously fact-focused New York Times news article is striking. (The two versions are both archived here if the diff is too hard to follow). The central issue that triggered the user anger, the way an employee was let go, moved from the first paragraph to the fifth, below a spiel about sexism and harassment that were only tangentially related to the issue.I was quite entertained by this College Humor video: Kinda Racist? Try Diet Racism!
I also thought this article on the queer women’s website Autostraddle was very interesting: What We Comment About When We Comment About Commenting.
And lastly, I was very sad to see that The Dissolve (a film criticism website funded by Pitchfork) has closed down.
The final line of that “Diet Racism” commercial made me snort water out my nose.
Huh. I can read that link on IE, but on Firefox it auto-redirects to an animated gif of fighting racoons.
So, this is a thing that happened.
On July 1, 2015, Zach Jesse was banned from sanctioned Magic: the Gathering tournaments until 2049, and his Magic Online account was suspended.
Two months ago, Zach Jesse made top 8 at Grand Prix: Atlantic City. During the event, well-known player Drew Levin brought to the Magic community’s attention that Zach Jesse is a registered sex offender; in 2004, Zach Jesse accepted a plea bargain and served three months of an eight year sentence for aggravated sexual battery.
He has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to his participation in Magic: the Gathering tournaments and there have been no other criminal allegations made against him.
The only statement made by Wizards of the Coast on the matter is this:
I don’t know how to react to this.
From what you say and (the very little) I have read, my initial reaction is that I think it’s wrong to ban him from MTG tournaments, or other legal public access activities.
1) It’s been over a decade, and he’s been tried, (imo inadequately) punished, and has had his civil rights restored. No matter how serious the crime, there has to be some point, if the person has served their time, that society re-accepts them as a participant in society.
I don’t want a society that is incapable of forgiveness or that sanctions punishing people forever. (Note that I said “a society”; what individuals do is another matter). I don’t say this because I don’t think his crime was terrible – I’d say the same thing about a convicted murderer, for example.
2) There is no safety in banning this guy from participating in tournaments. With or without him, there are going to be multiple rapists attending any large event, just by the law of averages. It’s just that most of the rapists have never been caught or tried. It’s just an illusion of safety.
3) What might increase safety is good education and supportive policies aimed at curtailing dangerous misbehavior by any attendees, including but not limited to this dude. And good reporting policies making it easy and safe for people to report problems or potential problems. And organizers who take the reports seriously.
4) I don’t know enough about MtG tournaments to know if there’s any way for people who don’t want to play with Zach Jesse to avoid having to play with him. That would be a good thing, if it’s possible.
Amp, I have similarly limited knowledge about the MTG situation, and I agree with your analysis on all points.
I have no idea what might cause the gif that you’re seeing when you try to follow the Autostraddle link about commenting whilst using Firefox, but it is kind of amusing in an ironic, meta way : )
And here is something else I stumbled upon in my internet travels today, which I thought the readers of Alas might get a kick out of: An Inside Out parody asks, “Was that Racist?”
(I haven’t read enough about this particular incident to make an intelligent comment on it, but:)
I’d be interested in any precedents like this, Amp, you may be able to cite. My initial thought is that it sounds like this would put the burden on individual people to insulate / protect themselves or assert their right formally not to interact with a convicted sexual batterer, which would either mean that someone like Jesse be banned from participating in a tournament (but free to attend) or that any players, judges, or audience members objecting would have to voluntarily abstain playing / judging / attending (in which case filing a formal objection would seem functionally moot, except to create a record of that objection). Unless anonymous (and I’m not sure how that would work, exactly, but you may have a specific example in mind), invariably these participants would be subjected to harassment; since that outcome, in light of recent incidents and a growing distaste among some people about enforcing even quite mild codes of conduct, is altogether predictable, only a small minority of participants who might otherwise need to avoid interacting with a convicted sexual batterer would find this helpful. I should think the majority would either grin and bear it, or abstain from attendance altogether because they no longer feel welcome and safe. That would solve the immediate problem — ensuring the safety of all participants and avoiding potentially violent confrontations — but at the expense of some people’s rights. And, as you say, banning someone like Jesse who has served a sentence* and has no reported history of assaulting or harassing additional victims**, is not reasonable*** in this case either.
*private conventions and tournaments have every right to selectively or indiscriminately limit participation to and revoke membership of whomsoever they choose for any reason (barring certain protected classes in certain states), including those convicted of select crimes, but these policies need to be determined and published in advance and applied consistently
**all the more reason to develop robust, zero-tolerance harassment policies that specifically define barred behavior and language, fully investigate reports of infractions, make potential consequences for violations clear and unambiguous, enforce these consequences, and involve local police when necessary, in order to establish such histories
***the ways in which the literal and metaphorical disenfranchisment of felons are applied in the US is a serious problem; clubs and conventions deciding to bar someone like Jesse from participating in their activities is not an example of such disenfranchisement. It’s reasonable to decide not to support or do business with such clubs, however, if one objects to how such decisions are made.
The most remarkable thing about this is, you hadn’t even taken a drink.
(I laughed out loud too, BTW.)
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/jul/13/ticker-judge-says-regret-root-rape-case/
The story is badly titled. It isn’t about Roe’s “regret”; it’s about the lack of due process afforded to Doe. In summary: The Hearing was unfair, the evidence did not support the findings, and Doe was subject to further punishment merely for appealing.
Presumably the decision is appealable.
Boy Scouts lift ban on gay leaders
Although each troop will apparently be able to decide for themselves whether to admit gay leaders. RonF, what do you think your leadership will do? They are pretty progressive, if I’m recalling correctly.
Eagle Scout here. Strong opinions.
I’m pleased that BSA made this decision. I think it’s reasonable for the BSA to conceptualize itself as an interfaith organization that permits a form of home rule on these issues. I think the value of a “we take all comers” approach to faith means that permitting individual troops to discriminate in certain ways is justifiable.
But.
First. I read their press release and supporting legal white paper. Would it have killed them to pretend that this was a principled decision based on respect for troops of all types, both inclusive of gay adult leaders and not? To say that they had heard the arguments of pro gay troops, and respected their conscientious beliefs as much as the beliefs of conservative religious troops, and had crafted a policy to accommodate both? Instead the take away message appears to have been that this change is intended to preserve as much discrimination as is legally possible by moving responsibility for it to religious entities.
Second. If there’s any intention of this being an actually principled decision, they need to follow through on it in other areas, and permit a lot more local decision making on other issues of conscience.
I tend to feel like Scouting taught me some really good values- which then caused me to separate myself from Scouting. This is a step in the right direction but in terms of my concerns about values it hasn’t been nearly as much of an improvement as it could have been.
Amp – I just found one of your cartoons reproduced on a conservative site on the basis that it’s being used in a high school class about racism, etc. I thought you’d be interested.
http://www.youngcons.com/high-school-teacher-using-this-cartoon-to-teach-white-people-about-boot-of-racism/
My leadership?
We are sponsored by an Episcopal church. The makeup of the congregation is shifting from Anglo to Latino. The priest is a Latino and a converted Roman Catholic priest (turns out the RC’s weren’t cool about his wife and kids). None of the kids in the Troop have parents in the parish. I’m told that Latino parents a) aren’t too exited about any organization that has uniforms, it brings back bad thoughts about police, military and border patrol, and b) it would interfere with soccer, which is a secular religion these days (and to be fair, athletics in general is such for all parents in our area, not just Latino ones.
My guess is that the parish will neither put pressure on us to have a gay leader nor will they object if we bring one in. I know for a fact that the units’ committees are not at all eager to bring in someone that they knew was gay as a leader and would only do so under pressure. I’m sure that if a gay parent showed up and we registered them as a leader, some of the families would leave and some wouldn’t. I’m sure that if a gay parent showed up and we refused to register them as a leader, none of the families would leave. I’m the COR (the official representative of the parish to both the units and the Council). I would not endorse any action that would split the Troop or Pack – I’m more concerned about the continuity and cohesion of the units than I am about any one person’s feelings. A couple of years ago I fired the Scoutmaster over that principle. As a senior member of the Council’s Commissioner Staff I can tell you that out-and-out telling a Scoutmaster “Your services are no longer needed” is quite rare, but should be done a LOT more often. Such a parent could complain to our priest – who could theoretically overrule me, but probably wouldn’t – and then to the Council, who would definitely NOT attempt to overrule us.
The funny thing is that when this discussion came up at the Troop committee level, someone used the phrase “… our first gay leader” only to have everyone’s jaw drop when I corrected them and said “you mean our NEXT gay leader”. A couple of years after the Troop formed we met a 23-year-old Eagle Scout cycling through the Forest Preserve where we had taken the boys for a hike. He spotted the uniforms and introduced himself. One thing led to another and he became a leader. He was great and did a fine job working with the kids. After a while I figured out that he was gay. But he never mentioned anything about the sexual part of his private life and – in accordance with BSA’s policy at the time – I never asked him. One of the other leaders picked up on it, but he was of like mind with me. No one else in the leadership and no one in the Troop Committee picked up on it (the Troop Committee didn’t have any real contact with him). After about 2 years he left – young kid, busy with his career, and maybe uncomfortable with the increasingly publicized controversy over membership standards – and we continued on. Except for that other leader, no one currently with the Troop was around then.
The decision is actually quite analogous to the decision on female leaders that was made back in the ’80’s. Women who meet the same standards as men (no felony convictions, orders of protection, DUIs, etc.) are eligible to register for the same leadership positions men do. However, units are free to refuse to register women as leaders. For example, you’ll never see a woman registered as Scoutmaster of a Troop sponsored by a Mormon stake. The same policy applies here. Gays and lesbians are now eligible to register for any leadership position. Units are free to refuse to register them.
Note, though, that units are free to refuse to register ANYONE as a leader, male or female. They are theoretically accountable to neither the person involved nor the local or National Council as to why they refused such registration.
Practically speaking, if a unit continually selectively refused to register leaders on the basis of race, they might find that the local Council would call the sponsor’s institutional head in and advise them that they’d be refused re-chartering if that didn’t change. That doesn’t happen for a refusal to register women as leaders to Mormon stakes, although in some more liberal areas it might. I doubt it’s going to happen for a refusal to register gays or lesbians – at least not for a very long time.
From that link:
That’s the Ed Anger School of Journalism & Commentary right there. Except, of course, Ed was publishing that phrase (endlessly) 35 years ago as satire.
“Would it have killed them to pretend that this was a principled decision based on respect for troops of all types, both inclusive of gay adult leaders and not?”
Give them credit for some integrity. This was not a principled decision based on any respect for inclusive Troops. It was a decision based on finances and membership. Corporate support for the BSA has dropped, membership has dropped, they’re taking a lot of heat in the media, and this move was made to counteract that. I’m personally glad to see that they’re not pretending to embrace principles that they do not in fact hold.
That’s pretty hilarious. Thanks.
The comments are impressively awful. I could make another racism-mocking cartoon based on quoting some those comments verbatim.
RonF- they could credibly claim to respect the values of troops that feel both ways on the issue, including those that welcome gay leaders. The reason why is simple- those troops exist, and their moral values are part of the BSA. Their words on this subject can reflect any or all of the views within the organization.
Those troops exist in direct defiance of the moral values promoted and defended by the BSA for a century. If you enter an institution holding – but hiding – moral values at odds to the values held by the institution, that does not make those values part of the institution’s values.
The B.S.A. did not adopt it’s current adult membership standards because of a change of heart on the part of the membership. It adopted them because it was forced to do so. I have heard very, very few people greet this change with pleasure or acceptance. There is a general feeling among the adult membership that National Council has betrayed them and abandoned it’s principles in exchange for money. The resentment and hardness of heart is going to last for many years. I’m sorry if you find that harsh, but I think it’s the truth.
That’s one reason why I thought you’d find it interesting!
Here’s another cartoon that made me laugh.
http://nonadventures.com/
For those of you feeling some stress, let me recommend this guided meditation.
“Forced” in the sense of a gun to the head? No, of course not. They were “forced” only in the sense that they risked being criticized, and having less money, if they did not change their position.
RonF- I don’t entirely disagree with you. I think you accurately described what happened here.
I just think that BSA could have validly, truthfully, and honestly said the following: “Our organization has always supported a wide variety of moral values. Just look to how many religious faiths we encompass. Listing them at the back of the Boy Scout Handbook takes multiple pages. As such we believe that certain moral questions should be resolved at the troop level. We have troops who’s moral values both embrace and prohibit gay men from taking leadership roles. They do so out of sincerely held faith positions, on both sides. As such it will henceforth not be our policy to dictate whether troops permit gay leaders. We will support our members in whatever choice they make.”
Nothing in that had to be untrue.
But it’s not true.
Because scouthood is no longer something worthy of pride.
Thanks for that.
In small world news, turns out my mom went to high school with Bernie Sanders. She says she remembers the face but not much else, although they were in the same Latin class. So says what he wrote in her yearbook.