4strugglemag

Editor’s note:

In our last issue David Gilbert wrote “An Open Letter to Movement Men About Sexism”.  We asked people to send in material about this important issue.  We are reprinting David’s letter and beginning a necessary discussion (again – 4sm first raised the issue of patriarchy and sexism a few years ago).  We invite readers – men and women, to send in their thoughts and experiences.  As we often say, “Freedom is a Constant Struggle”, and that includes contradictions within our own attitudes and understanding and within our collectives and organizations.

An Open Letter to Movement Men About Sexism

BY DAVID GILBERT

Dear Brothers,

There is no way we can be revolutionaries, no way we can stand with humanity for liberation, without actively combating male supremacy. That imperative requires both a political program against patriarchy and concerted struggle against sexism within ourselves. We all grew up in this society so, even with our passionate ideals, problems with ego, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism within ourselves are inevitable. What is inexcusable is to fail to engage in sincere and open-hearted efforts to change.

It has been extremely upsetting to have heard, even with my limited contact with the outside activist communities, of several incidents of sexual assault and then – to add bitter insult to monstrous injury – the frequent failures to have a process for holding perpetrators accountable and for setting unmistakable standards for activist communities. We are fighting for a world without sexual assault, abuse, coercion – how can we allow that to continue within our ranks?

Men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, the violations and the denial of self-determination involved, parallels the ideology and practice of imperialism. Each attack does vicious harm to a sister, while the reality of sexual assault is the ferocious spearhead of the much broader offensive against women’s fully active and assertive role in our movements, which we sorely need for the colossal challenges we face. Also, our failure to develop a process to stop such crimes is corrosive to our own humanity.

In the 1960s we started from nowhere in terms of dealing with patriarchy – and nowhere meant the continued dominance of male supremacy. Then, women’s collective leadership around feminism and anti-imperialism, although often faced with reactionary resistance from men, won major advances.

As dramatic as those changes were, they of course weren’t nearly enough; on top of that we have evidently failed in our responsibility to pass on hard-won lessons to the post-Seattle, 1999, generation of activists. If we don’t do better on this, we leave a lethal hole in the heart of our movement.

In my own experience, the most fruitful response to women’s liberation came in the form of Men Against Sexism groups – if they weren’t just a place to talk about our feelings but if we also consciously grappled with sexism, checked-in with and sought guidance from feminists, and took on solidarity work such as childcare and/or educating other men and boys.

Today, we may want and need additional formats, for example, to fight the oppression of those who are gender nonconforming. Whatever the forms, concerted struggle against patriarchy, with male supremacy as a central axis, is absolutely necessary.

Male supremacy is extremely deep-seated in history and in society. Change doesn’t come easily and won’t always be comfortable. As difficult as it may seem, advances on this front can stop the brutality of men’s assaults on women in our communities and help create a welcoming climate for their full participation. We can’t have a real movement, we can’t possibly be successful, without the invaluable contributions and leadership women can provide. Such advances can also make us men more whole, more loving human beings.

White supremacy, male supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, class rule, and imperialism are powerful pillars of oppression. We have to dismantle them all to clear the ground to build the more humane and sustainable world that is so urgently needed.

One love,

David Gilbert

(anti-imperialist political prisoner)

“Recent events in India (the group rape and murder of the Indian woman on a bus) show what women are really up against in society as it now is run (for profit only).  These conditions for women exist all over the world, exacerbated by war.  Insofar as sexism exists in progressive circles, it’s a pale reflection of the whole weight of sexist social norms of class-divided society.  As long as real power is in the hands of only a few (and those are almost all white men), as long as human beings cannot control their own lives in even the most minimal sense, oppression of women will continue.  And although we can win some small reforms that chip away at sexist oppression of women, we cannot make long term gains until we do away with capitalism and create a genuine democratic society where each contributes according to his or her abilities, and each receives according to his or her needs.” – Carole Seligman

guernicamag.com

America’s first openly transgender law professor on the power of zines, the sacrifice social movements require, and the limits of legal reform.

The average lifespan of a transgender person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgender people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores.

In 2002, Spade founded Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the first center of its kind, which provides free legal services to low-income transgender and gender non-conforming people and advocates for policy reform that would eliminate gender expression-based discrimination and violence. The center is a collective. It works from the assumption that economic, racial, and gender issues are inseparable.

Spade asks that we rethink equality. As the Assistant Professor of Law at Seattle University, he’s the first openly trans tenure-track law professor in the U.S. (or at least the first that he knows of), but he envisions a movement that de-emphasizes lawsuits, the go-to weapon of American political struggles. Legislation, Spade says, can bring change, but it usually just invites more people into the privileged circle within an unjust system. Violence continues for those, like gender nonconformists, not fully accepted as citizens. Likewise, Spade interrogates the current nonprofit model, one that he argues often adopts and maintains capitalist rules, values and hierarchies.

Spade’s writing, and his example, forces his readers, especially those involved in nonprofit work and progressive politics, into vigorous self-reflection. He doesn’t allow himself or his audience the comfort of easy answers. There’s no dreariness or nihilism to Spade though. He seeks a social transformation that will allow no person to feel impossible.

—Meaghan Winter for Guernica

Guernica: What are some of the limitations of the popular view that trans rights/issues are a subset of gay and lesbian issues?

Dean Spade: I think that that idea comes from some important historical precedent and contemporary experiences. Gender norms and norms about sexuality are very intertwined in our culture, and people targeted for breaking those norms include lots of kinds of queer and trans people, so it makes sense that we would be in a fight together and we’ve been perceived by people who are targeting us for violence as people who are similar. I think there’s a lot of important overlap in that politics that makes a lot of sense.

Lots of gay and lesbian people haven’t experienced not having a gender that the government recognizes.

The dilemma is that there are a couple of different trajectories that make that a limitation. One is that since the sixties and seventies a strand emerged in gay and lesbian politics that really looked to divorce itself from trans people and people of color and low-income people and looked to pursue a gay and lesbian politics that is kind of cleaned up and more socially acceptable to existing norms and existing frameworks. And that has meant that there’s been a lot of bad blood between people promoting that politics and those they’ve separated themselves from, including trans people.

Another thing is that on the ground and in daily life, there are some specific issues that trans people face that are different from what non-trans gay and lesbian people face. And so having a politics that doesn’t recognize that there are differences in and amongst different people targeted by gender and sexuality norms means you’re going to have a politics that doesn’t actually address everybody’s needs. For example, trans people have a huge set of legal issues around how various government agencies and other entities see our gender, and lots of gay and lesbian people haven’t experienced not having a gender that the government recognizes. So if we just pursue a politics that pretends we’re all the same, there are people we’re going to miss, and oftentimes people who are highly vulnerable are the ones whose issues we’re going to miss.

Guernica: Can you tell me about your forthcoming book?

Dean Spade: Yeah, it’s coming out September 2011 from South End Press. It’s a book that tries to describe what a critical trans politics looks like. We’re in this moment where there’s this gay and lesbian politics that’s really lacking in its racial and economic justice analysis and overly relies on legal reform for its strategy and doesn’t really look at people in dire need today. So this book says, okay, we have the option to focus on hate crime laws and other legal reforms or we can reframe what trans politics is and center economic and racial justice. We can realize that changing the law doesn’t change people’s lives and have an understanding of the limitations of the nonprofit form, the ways in which concentrating leadership in professionals and having nondemocratic models for organizations and movements harms and undermines the transformative change we are seeking. The book lays out those frameworks that I call a critical trans politics.

What’s emerged is a very thin national narrative about social change that often says that groups that are marginalized should just win lawsuits.

Guernica: How does focusing on law reform fall short? Why is legal inclusion a flawed ideal?

Dean Spade: A lot of my writing is about trying to understand what role legal work has in strategies for transformative social change. Part of the reason that question is so important right now is that there has been widescale attacks on social movements over the last thirty or forty years in response to the very meaningful social movements in the sixties and seventies that had very transformative demands, that were seeking a redistribution of wealth and of life chances in really significant ways. What’s emerged in their place is a very thin national narrative about social change that often centers on the law and often says that groups that are marginalized or experiencing subjugation of various kinds should just win lawsuits and pass laws to change their lives.

But the hard thing is that few lawsuits actually have those effects. On one hand, a lot of laws are not enforced or never implemented. For example, in a lot of places it’s illegal to fire or not hire someone for being trans, but that happens every single day. Very little can be done about that in the current framework. The systemic homelessness and poverty many trans people face doesn’t seem to be sufficiently addressed by passing a law that says we shouldn’t discriminate against trans people. Law reforms declaring race and disability discrimination illegal haven’t solved concentrated joblessness, poverty, homelessness, or criminalization of people with disabilities and people of color. Often people who the law says should have equal chances at jobs still don’t have equal chances at jobs, and they’re still on the losing side of the severe wealth divide in the U.S. So how can we start to strategize for social movements that don’t believe the myth that changing the law is the key way to change people’s lives?

Another thing is that at times what law reform does do is put a window dressing of fairness on systems that are deeply unfair. Maybe some of the people, the most enfranchised in a particular group, will be somewhat better off through law reforms, because they have a lot of other kinds of wealth or privilege in terms of the overall system. Oftentimes, in that way law reform stabilizes a status quo; it stabilizes the existing field of maldistribution. Those people who are worst off really don’t see a lot of change, or may be further marginalized.

A lot of us are trying to look at what has really been powerful in the history of the U.S. in terms of changing people’s lives, and that’s been broad social movements led by people directly impacted by the issues. They often have demands that far exceed what the law could ever give, demands that are not going to be passed by Congress or won in courts. Those demands actually confront the things that America is based on, like white supremacy or settler colonialism. The law can be a useful tool to address certain needs for certain communities, but it’s nowhere near a silver bullet that will make people equal. That mythology is the part of the mythology of our nation, a mythology that people are often not willing to question if they are benefiting from existing conditions of maldistribution.

Guernica: I’ve noticed that you often use the phrase “life chances.” Why not just say “the distribution of wealth”?

Dean Spade: I think that to me “life chances” is a phrase that captures the many, many vectors of harm and well-being that are being distributed in ways that I’m concerned about. For example, whether or not fresh groceries are available in your community, whether there’s toxic waste and polluting industry nearby where you live, whether in your whole life you’re likely to have a job that interests you, what level your local schools are funded at, whether someone in your family is dying or suffering from lack of healthcare and you’re carrying around the stresses of that.

Ruth Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” and I think that’s really useful for thinking about what we’re trying to get at. This definition turns our attention away from the questions that discrimination law gets us caught up in: did someone intentionally exclude you because of your identity and can you prove that? Instead, it lets us see that where we find population-level maldistribution of life chances, there is injustice. It doesn’t matter whether we can find one individual with a bad intention, or whether the law stated an intent to exclude a certain group. If a group is being exposed to premature death through overexposure to pollution, police violence, hunger, lack of healthcare, poverty, homelessness, military occupation—those conditions must be remedied and the systems causing them must be dismantled. Sometimes movements have gotten too concerned with law reform or just trying to get government recognition instead of actually trying to change people’s chances at living. We need to not be satisfied until people actually have good housing, healthcare, education, and all those things that you actually need to live well and thrive.

Guernica: Can you tell me about the Sylvia Rivera Law Project? Are you still involved in that?

Dean Spade: Yes, I’m still involved. SRLP provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color facing discrimination based on gender identity and expression, and does broader policy reform work, litigation, public education, and organizing support. Our day-to-day work includes providing poor people with urgently-needed legal help to contest their welfare benefits being cut off, or to prevent them from being evicted, or help them get to a homeless shelter, or prevent them from being deported. We work on changing racist, transphobic, anti-poor, anti-immigrant policies in shelter systems, foster care systems, criminal punishment systems, schools, healthcare settings, and other high-stakes spaces of harm for our constituents. Our work is centered in demands for racial and economic justice, prison abolition, and an end to immigration enforcement. We believe that to reach those broader goals we need to both provide immediate support to people suffering in violent systems as part of creating resistance in which people experiencing the most vulnerability have political leadership and take collective action to make change.

Guernica: How is SRLP funded? At the nonprofits I’ve worked for there was sometimes this disconnect between what the employees believed and how our funding required us to act.

Dean Spade: In general, the kind of work SRLP does isn’t funded by the government. Government funding of legal services, generally, was severely undermined in the last few decades, and this particular kind of work is especially off the radar of government grantmaking. We raise money through individual donors, grassroots fundraising, and foundation grants. We believe that the best way to support this work is through grassroots fundraising, which maximizes the accountability of the organization to the communities it serves rather than to wealthy philanthropists, so we put a lot of work into constantly building that aspect of our fundraising.

Guernica: Do you think that it’s best for nonprofits or collectives engaged in social movements to fund themselves, so as not to be hindered by funding requirements?

Dean Spade: We’re not absolutists about anything. Change requires a broad range of people on the left who are concerned about the ways in which funding determines the content of movement work and often ensures that organizations will only do things that are not terribly threatening to the status quo, so we really believe that building more organizations that are coming from the communities affected rather than from large foundations or the government that steer the work is a really important move. For us, that’s always a work in progress.

Obviously it’s hard to raise money from communities that are impoverished, but we consider fundraising part of our organizing and a way of building communities that are going to support and sustain the work for a long time, regardless of whatever happens with any foundation. We want an organization that can survive any decision a foundation makes about our politics. It’s a complicated moment right now. It can be strategic for some organizations to take some funding from foundations or the government, depending on their particular work and approach and what other groups they are in coalition with who are using more autonomous approaches. People in SRLP and our allied organizations are trying to be strategic about the severe lack of resources and trying to figure out how people’s needs can be met while ensuring that movements are not co-opted by government or wealthy philanthropists, and that’s a complicated situation. We spend a lot of time in conversation with our allies and within our organization about these issues and make these decisions with care. This conversation has been strongly influenced and bolstered in the last few years by the publication of the excellent book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the NonProfit Industrial Complex, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. I highly recommend that book.

I held a sit-in at my school when they were trying to defund a program and fire a teacher, and in high school I discovered feminism.

Guernica: To play devil’s advocate, or to push on this idea, is it a lot to ask or expect of people who are living hand to mouth to also have the means to contribute to an organization or a campaign?

Dean Spade: Social movements require a lot of work. Historically, people have been invested in doing that work because they believe their life depends on it. A lot of different frameworks have existed around membership organizations. People always cite César Chávez, who famously said that all the farm workers should paid dues to the United Farm Workers so it could be theirs and they could own it.

There are organizations like The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in Toronto using a membership dues approach. Their members are homeless or marginally housed, and they ask for membership dues, and people are excited to contribute. It’s not the only way they raise money, but it’s one way. I think we have to look at some of our assumptions. We need to look at the alternatives. We can either have our work funded by foundations that are owned and run by rich people who are likely to fund work that does not upset the arrangements that allow them to remain rich. Foundation control limits the demands that get made by social movements and the strategies engaged. We need to imagine an alternative. Most organizing work was once unpaid; it was de-professionalized; it was not funded in any way besides small ways like, hey, you guys can work out of my basement. Right now many people engaged in resistance are experimenting with different approaches to these problems. Membership structures with dues are one option, although they aren’t ideal for every organization. Some organizations create revenue-generating activities to sustain themselves, ranging from bake sales to various sliding scale services to retail operations and more. Some organizations focus on building a base of donors who give small amounts monthly while others focus on creating big annual events where they try to raise a significant chunk of their budgets. Some focus on in-kind donations such as free office space. Others choose not to have any paid staff in order to avoid creating a large budget that needs to be raised every year. Different strategies make sense for different groups.

Guernica: What inspired you to become involved in this kind of work, and how did you get started?

Dean Spade: I think I was raised to question authority. My mom was raising us by herself, she had never finished high school, she was working low-wage jobs and relying on welfare, and she gave me a pretty good sense that things were not as they should be. She was not politically active, but she valued critical thinking and protest. I had a sense, even though I was a typical kid trying to fit in, that the racism, sexism, and wealth divide I was mired in was fucked up. I participated in anti-war activities during the first Bush administration and I held a sit-in at my school when they were trying to defund a program and fire a teacher, and in high school I discovered feminism.

When I left home and went to college and found out about queerness, I immediately got very involved both on campus and off campus in queer organizations, but I was disturbed as the mid-nineteen nineties’ welfare reform and immigration reform debates emerged and the gay and lesbian organizations I was working with had very little to say. I became very disillusioned with what I saw at these organizations, who they prioritized, who they hired, how they treated workers, and I joined up with grassroots queer organizing in NYC that was full of former ACT UP activists who were resisting Giuliani’s anti-poor, anti-queer, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-sex work policies. That work introduced me to a lot of new frameworks and direct action strategies, and to mentors who introduced me to new ways of thinking about queer politics and set me on this path.

Law reforms declaring race and disability discrimination illegal haven’t solved concentrated joblessness, poverty, homelessness or criminalization of people with disabilities and people of color.

Guernica: You’re very open in writing about yourself, in terms of class and your own gender identity and experiences. How do you decide whether and how you’re going to make an example of yourself? Is the need or inclination to use yourself as an example an extra burden that you bear as a trans person and professional?

Dean Spade: I came of age around politics in the nineties when there was this zine culture, where people were self-publishing and writing informally and sharing stuff with each other. People frequently spoke from the position of their own experiences and identities to talk about political and social issues. That’s where I got my start writing. I found that culture and way of communicating extremely powerful, especially when I felt alienated from what could be said in academic spaces. I wrote like that for years, and I still sometimes do. Because of the ways in which trans people are objectified in our culture sometimes that’s backfired on me. People have this fascination with trans people that can feel sensationalist and objectifying, so I think over the years my writing has trended away from some of that exposure. There are some things I wish weren’t out there, but I really believe in letting yourself change over time and accepting earlier iterations.

I think it’s really important that people talk more about the emotional dynamics that we are all carrying around class and money and consumerism and our fears of scarcity. I’m doing the Enough blog with Tyrone about money and daily questions and practices that we all contend with about wealth redistribution, and that’s been really important for me in terms of creating space for a personal politics around that stuff. A lot of us who have come from feminism and queer politics and other movements have for a long time had firm ideas that the personal is political, but we don’t always have a space to really talk about our personal discussions and practices. People find talking about wealth distribution really challenging, but I think we’re in need of honest dialogue where people can make themselves vulnerable around issues of money, share dilemmas, and share principles or practices they are trying out. We created Enough to share those kinds of stories and role model those inquiries for each other. I think that’s a useful kind of personal writing to be doing right now.

Guernica: What can people like me do to support trans people and others?

Dean Spade: The most urgent things we can all be involved in are working to oppose the immigration enforcement system and the criminal punishment system and working in our local areas to prevent more prisons and immigration detention centers from being built and laws targeting immigrants or increasing criminal punishment from being expanded. That means standing up against gang ordinances, “aggressive panhandling” laws, increased sentencing for any kind of criminalized behavior, laws that make it harder for immigrants to get drivers’ licenses or healthcare or social services, etc. It also means building coalitions around local campaigns to de-criminalize anything we can and to increase access to basic necessities for immigrants. We can also work to build alternatives to violent state systems. We can all work to educate ourselves about racism, ableism, transphobia, sexism. There are so many things we all can do beyond Facebook activism or Moveon.org or whatever. We can actually look at what’s going on in our actual communities and work with other people directly to change things that concern us.

A lot of communities have passed laws making it harder to make bail or make it illegal to sit out on the sidewalk. It’s worth looking into whether your jurisdiction has signed onto Homeland Security’s Secure Communities, which is a program that puts local law enforcement in collaboration with ICE, and that’s something we can all work on. There’s just tons and tons of room in all of our communities to oppose state violence and systems of violence that we know are happening. There’s just tons of room for more work. In every community the strategy will be different—we have to look at what issues are primed because they will form the basis of excellent coalitional work, meaning they will be of interest to lots of different vulnerable populations, and it is ideal to think about winnability when building campaigns. That doesn’t mean watering down an issue, it just means choosing issues where the particular kinds of reframing we are trying to do are likely to work. I recommend reading about organizing strategy. Rinku Sen’s book Stir It Up is very helpful, as is POWER’s book Toward Land, Work, and Power. The website Organizing Upgrade is also a great resource right now.

Resources Mentioned:

Gender Is Compliance: Trans Politics and Law Reform in a Neoliberal Landscape by Dean Spade.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.

Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy by Rinku Sen.

Towards Land, Work and Power: Charting a Path of Resistance to U.S.-Led Imperialismby POWER.

Enough, a blog by Spade and Tyrone Boucher.

OrganizingUpgrade.com.

Editors Recommend:

Sweet Nothings: Civil rights champion David Mixner on his battle to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” why the February 2nd Congressional hearings were a bust, and how the policy all but guarantees sexual harassment of women soldiers.

BY TOBY V. POTTER, mxgm.org

Living with other dudes hasn’t always filled me with a sense of joy and community.  For a lot of my “not living with my parents” life, living with other guys has been a means to cheaper rent, a bigger music selection, and some surface level friendship (i.e. “drinking buddy”).  It’s only been for the past several years that male housemates have turned into people I can turn to for support and care, for real friendship (even when we’re sober!), someone I can get help dealing with my shit from, and who can turn to me for the same.  Needless to say, it’s much more fulfilling living with these dudes than it ever was before.

Men’s groups have come and gone in my life- some great, some poor, and some the word “group” is too big of a compliment.  Part of the big problem early on with my experimenting was that I didn’t really get it, didn’t know what the point of a men’s group was. I just knew that female socialized friends had mentioned at least a few times that it would be great if “all you guys would get together and talk”.  So why not, we talk all the time (aaaalllllll the time).  We’d get together every so often, pat ourselves on the back a few times about getting together, talk about figuring out what to talk about, then pick the next meeting time….  Not the most transformative to say the least.

All of this was happening at the same time as house meetings where the same few things were always talked about- who keeps leaving those dishes, at the last party I barely said a word because dudes were talking the whole time, my favorite bowl is still dirty, I’m sick of getting interrupted, who is hoarding all the mugs, only the guys are able to do the fun construction projects, maybe we should slow down on drinking, the sink is literally too full of dishes to get drinking water, don’t put soap in the cast irons!  Sure, it wasn’t just the guys leaving behind dirty dishes, but a lot of the problems were ours.  The dudes at the house decided that we should get together to get our shit together.

In thinking about what it was we should do during our meetings, and how we should go about “fixing” things, we made a couple profound (for us) realizations.  First, we couldn’t “fix” everything.  What would it matter if all the dudes in the house agreed to split up the days of the week and make sure to do all the dishes on our days.  Sure, no more dish discussion at the house meetings (think of how short they would be!). Patriachy gone?  Sadly no. The same was true for any issue that we might try to deal with in our house.  This isn’t to say that it’s a waste of time to make sure we live in safe and healthy environments; but that if our work ends there we’ve missed the point (and haven’t done much work probably).

There are zillions of reasons why it’s important to start some kind of men’s group- and house issues was our first one.  We also wanted to recognize that it shouldn’t always be female socialized friends pointing out problems; but to take some responsibility for ourselves, and deal with it together. While none of us had been called out for sexual assault, it’s mostly dudes who are – so we wanted to be prepared to help deal with that situation if it arose. It also isn’t just in times of extreme violence like sexual assault that patriarchy rears its ugly head.  The day to day passive violence of patriarchy is what makes those incidents of active violence possible. The willingness to interrupt female socialized people more often than male socialized; instantly believing another guy, while endlessly questioning the fact/judgment/ideas of women friends; dudes being generally incapable of showing love and care; talking longer and louder all the time thereby taking up all the available space; having that attitude that guys are “just cooler”; sexualizing women’s bodies through anything from surreptitious stares to crude jokes and comments; the list could be pages long. The point is, we live in a society biased towards men (and white people, and wealthier people, and hetero people, and able-bodied people…), and the result of being a man is having a lot of privilege. And it’s usually invisible.  All the things we don’t have to notice, don’t ever see or hear about, and certainly never have to think about if we don’t want to… those are the things that are destroying our lives, and the lives of everyone that we care about.

Unfortunately no men’s group is going to get rid of patriarchy and create a more just and equitable society where everyone can be who they are without fear and pain. But I know that in my life it’s been the times I’ve been with other guys that have been the best – easiest and hardest – times to work through my lifetime of socialization as a male. To some extent we know what the other person is going through, I am able to empathize with how hard it is to challenge those privileges and get to the bottom of why I treat people the way I do.  It’s other guys who are able to support me when I make a mistake and need help figuring out what I did, and how not to do it again. Without some intentional space to make that possible it usually just doesn’t get talked about.

That first house group met for a couple years.  Not only did we talk about how to make sure our house was safer- both from our behavior, and when we had parties/potlucks- but we did manage to get down to some of that insidious stuff.  The stuff that’s hard to see, and really hard to hear when someone else sees it in you. Having that supportive environment made it possible for me to take some of the first concrete steps towards challenging my own privilege. We had time each week to talk about what we were working on in ourselves, and to tell each other what we thought the others could be doing (way harder to say).  Each meeting ended with a description of a scenario one of us had seen and needed help knowing how to respond to it – cat-calling on the street, a messed up comment at a party, seeing a guy put-down his partner. Then the following meeting would start with what each of us would have done in that situation to call it out or deal with it.  It was one of the ways that helped to broaden our perspective from our little house bubble out into the real world.

The house dudes group fell apart when we all moved away.  But other houses I’ve lived in have had similar groups – thankfully none of them had led to doing everyone else’s dishes.  

I say that I am transgender.

I did a short performance before the Trans March at the last Pride. I was one of several “speakers” to address a small crowd in a park near Church Street in Toronto. I was dressed in black, carrying a long wooden stick with a self-made flag attached to it, which I called my “shame flag”. I had just finished a two-week long process to transform some of my shame and I spoke about shame. I particularly shared the shame that I still felt for not surrendering to the crowd, for not feeling that I belonged. As if I was not enough, as if I had not done enough, as if my story was not worth it or clear enough or stereotypical enough. When I gave the flag to a woman who volunteered to repeat my action in another context, I felt that I had “done my job”, whatever this meant. Something, somewhere had changed. What? Where?

Let’s go deeper. In the present. Today, i am dark. Right now. Right now.

As most of the times, I am in limbo. limbo is when you eat and food overstimulates you and then it makes you want to die. Limbo is when you take immense pleasure at digging a nice grave-like horizontal hole in dirt and you are elated by the beauty of dirt, crying and laughing at the same time. It is when you feel peacefully held by the hole as if for the last time. And then the light you get from the dirt makes you want to get up again. You get up and it starts all over again. Limbo is when you decide not “to do this” anymore and you walk on the edge, literally, almost falling in your mind and physically. And you can see this wall of glass in your mind. One side is fucking familiar with submission, resignation, self-beating, anxiety, fears, anger, rage and very very hidden self-love. The other side is unknown, just as unknown as death itself. And it feels impossible to cross the boundary. Limbo is when you decide not “to do this” anymore and you see the emotionally and physically painful zig zag thread that your social body is creating to keep you functioning in this society. it is like a line of fast track survival information with anchor points painfully tightening fascia at some very specific places. Over and over and over and over. And it hurts. And you see that if this could just stop, you would be quite different. Sometimes there is clarity saying that the one under is of another gender. Sometimes you listen to this information and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you think that you are just a product of this identity-obsessed society and that the one under does not care about gender.

One day later. This is where I try to face it. Gender identity. When I say that, my mind gets angry. i go in some sort of blank slate that feels like shock. I can’t face the question fully. It runs around in my mind and my mind goes in all sorts of useless directions. The question is held in doubt and circular arguments although I know that I need my heart to deal with it and I literally need to look at it as if straight in front of me. I need my heart and I also need my deepest hurt. Bring the question closer to the heart and the hurt and see if something gets clarified. Trying an experiment with myself. Ask the question and answer. Well, I can’t trust that my mind will hear what the heart and the hurt have to say. And, bizarrely enough, I haven’t trusted my art neither. When the art says “I am happy as a man”, the mind says, this is just one part of you. Can I ask the question now? Will I hear the spirit? Or maybe it is not the spirit who will know. Oh, again. I feel like Beckett in his book entitled “L’innommable”. Something is hiding and I do not know how to reach it in a trustworthy way. Of course, I should say now that I would not trust you neither if you were to tell me who I am. Am I in between then? That’s painful. Am I both a woman and a man? Right now, that seems like bullshit, or like a trick from the mind to calm me down.. What I now remember is that when I work as a bicycle mechanic, things seem way simpler. My energy focuses and sometimes I am more of a man. Rarely though. I had thought that my voice would go down there because this is what it does when I reach a truth. Oh, my hair is going up right now. Oh, I have just revealed how i could trust an answer. My voice goes down or my hair goes up…..

Some days later. I draw with the aim of approaching the question of whether my deep pain has to do with gender identity. When I looked at my drawing, I see a girl with my right eye and a boy with my left eye……

Gender identity. Am I a woman? I was. Am I a man? I will know when this exhausted part of my brain, this injured part of my brain will be repaired. I will know when the zig zag thread will stop zig zagging in my head pulling it away from centre, from facing, from seeing. Now, I am tired of all this future tense. There should be a way to look at this NOW. What if I say: there is a way. I look now: I am a human being and I am alive. I know that I am alive because some things change all the time inside. I will never be biologically male. I will never be a young boy. I will never have grown up with the entitlement that men get. I will always be a feminist. I will never completely erase the traces of my psychological pain. I will always have my doubts. I can accept that I have been a woman and that I have had pleasure in the body of this woman. I accept the woman: Oh, accepting the woman brings me right in my centre, through vagina and throat. Something comes up and I feel close to my cells, feeling every sensation as if my mind and meat were almost the same. It is incredibly new. Then, the acceptance brings me to something that is not far from self-love. I Imagine that I am a man and deep tears are called. They come from the unknown of way deeper and larger than me. I shake. Something soft comes around to hold me, all over. I relate to the usual sensations from inside in a very different way. I am calm.

One week later. I  meet with a transgendered person whom I did not know before. He explained to me how it felt in his mind when he first started with testosterone injections. I understood exactly what he said although I have never had any testosterone injections. My hair was coming up all over my body and I was feeling a small shift in identity. It was quite incredible. My being was excited but it did not take very long until I landed back into my familiar place with little energy.

Two days later. The doctor has cancelled my appointment. I have to reschedule.

BY NATALIE REED, freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed

The title kind of says it all, I guess.

Lately, I’ve come to notice a kind of annoying trend amongst many cis feminists who profess themselves as allies to trans people and trans-feminism. Far too many such allies (I think “ally”, like “social justice”, is a term that I no longer consider benign, and have come to regard as a bit of a red flag) seem to take an approach whereby they implicitly (though perhaps unconsciously and unknowingly) treat feminism’s ongoing issues with cissexism, cisnormativity, cis-centrism and transphobia as being trans people’s job and responsibility to solve. As though the onus is on us, the victims of feminism’s tendency towards privileging the needs of cis women, to “solve” the problem and make it right, rather than the responsibility of cis feminists themselves to, you know… not do that shit in the first place.

It’s never the job or ethical responsibility of the victims of oppression to end it. In fact, oppression operates in exactly such a way that even if it were the victims’ responsibility to end oppression, they wouldn’t be empowered to do so. The obligation (and power) always rests on the shoulders of the oppressor and those privileged by the oppression to end it. The victims may fight against their oppression, sure, but the oppressors’ responsibility isn’t simply “don’t fight back”; it is also “fight on the side of the victims”.

It’s also not the job or ethical responsibility of the victims of oppression to educate their oppressor as to how to not be an oppressor. That said, I’ve decided to opt to offer some suggestions as to how cis feminists who are interested in ultimately creating a trans-inclusive, intersectional feminism can help do so (cis feminists whose interest in this is hopefully not motivated by cookies or the ability to claim ally status, but instead because it’s the right thing to do and, as the saying goes, “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”)

So, if you’re more keen for intersectional feminism than you are for bullshit feminism, it’s time to stop sitting around waiting for trans feminists to make everything better. It’s time to engage yourself, and here are some pretty simple, easily-applicable starting points.

1) Be willing to confront instances of transphobia, cissexism, cisnormativity, cis-centrism, cis privilege and other forms of destructive bias where you find them (especially when you find them within feminist, activist or queer spaces), not through “call outs” or other toxic, self-defeating, or abusive strategies, but by taking the opportunity for genuine discourse.

I’m not a fan of internet “call-out culture” at all. To be perfectly honest, I’ve got nothing but contempt for it, no matter how just the underlying cause may be. Mostly, it strikes me as an excuse for bullying and abuse. And most of the time, that’s all that’s really going on, with “social justice” simply operating as an excuse. This is especially apparent when the “call outs” and underlying questions of “safety” are being directed against an already marginalized group, and when the abusive, toxic “call outs” are being conducted by the privileged themselves “on behalf” of some other marginalized group. Like the many recent occurrences in which self-identified “allies” of trans women bombarded transphobic or cissexist cis women with disgusting, misogynistic harassment and slurs like “you transphobic c–t!” or whatever, supposedly as an act of “solidarity” with trans women. How anyone can think that trans women will want men to say a bunch of misogynistic shit “on our behalf” is beyond me, unless they not only fail to realize that we’re women, but also fail to realize that we consider ourselves women. Which is, you know, ridiculous.

Anyway… yes, I get that sometimes bigotry and oppression and sexism and transphobia can be really ugly, painful and emotionally volatile things. I understand that they can make people angry. Understandably so, sure. But if you’re not the target or victim of the bigotry or oppression, if you’re not the person it affects, and if you’re not the person who has to live with the consequences, it’s not really your place to make the strategic call of vocalizing that anger, given how rarely it has a positive outcome. (I do, however, understand a trans person reacting emotionally and unstrategically to an act of transphobia, given that it’s hir choice and perogative to do so… likewise I understand PoC reacting as such to racism, women reacting as such to misogyny, PwD reacting as such to able-ism, etc. I don’t view it as “productive”, but people’s right to empower themselves through owning their anger supercedes that question of strategy… UNLESS you’re speaking “for” a different group than your own).

People who are into “call outs” often wonder aloud why it’s so rare for people to respond with a simple apology. I wonder why, given that a particular approach consistently fails to produce the intended response, they never consider that the approach might be the problem. Again, I understand expressing and owning one’s anger for its own sake, and the sake of self-empowerment, but I don’t understand anyone who regards the “call-out” as a genuinely effective, long-term strategy for dealing with oppression. I also mistrust their motives, given how the majority of call-out culture seems to have nothing to do with actually making anything better for anyone.

So I’d really, really, really prefer if cis people didn’t take this approach to transphobia. I don’t think being swarmed by embittered mobs is likely to make any transphobe any more aware of the issues… or likely to improve anything for anybody. I think it’s most likely to create bitterness, and cause people to dig their heels in.

It also wastes an opportunity.

When someone says something transphobic or cissexist, that presents an opportunity for discussing that with the person, pointing out how/why what they said was messed up, and hopefully, slowly, gradually, helping steer that person (and those within earshot, and communities and cultures as a whole) towards greater trans awareness and sensitivity.

It may or may not make a difference for the particular individual, but it introduces a chance for discussion of trans issues. Rather than that incident becoming a means by which transphobia and cissexism is normalized and affirmed within whatever social context it occurs within (such as a feminist reading and discussion group, or an abuse-survivor’s support group, or a feminist subreddit), it becomes a mean by which the importance of a sensitive, intelligent, nuanced and non-oppressive approach to trans issues can be normalized and affirmed as an aspect of that social context. Do you know what I mean?

No, as I mentioned in the introduction, the oppressed never OWE education to their oppressors, nor do they ever OWE it to the oppressor to be nice about the subject of their oppression. But in this case? It’s not YOUR oppression, cis feminists. It’s ours. You’re part of the oppressor class. And so long as you benefit from cis privilege, and you acknowledge such social inequities as a bad thing, it IS kinda your responsibility to take whatever opportunities you have for helping make things a bit better. And that includes educating each other. And being nice about it, if that’s what the situation demands.

Rather than treating instances of transphobia and cissexism in your communities as an opportunity to show off what an ally you are, and exercise your internet smackdown skills, and hurt someone who “deserves” it, treat it as an opportunity to bring genuine trans discussion into the space, and strategically work towards improvement. It’s a slow road, but if this occurs often enough, in enough spaces, it WILL eventually have a meaningful impact. And people WILL ease up a bit on the open contempt, erasure or dismissal of trans people.

2) Don’t take a purely passive, reactive approach. Rather than waiting for things, like someone saying something overtly cissexist, or a trans person bringing up a particular concern, be willing to proactively introduce trans issues, or trans-relevant aspects of broader issues, to feminist discourse. Likewise, proactively treat possible consequences, perspectives and concerns relevant to trans people and trans experiences as being not only significant but essential to all feminist issues and conversations.

The trouble, though, with using moments of someone saying something cissexist as your opportunities to discuss trans issues, awareness, inclusivity, intersectionality and so on is that it allows the cissexists to define the terms of that discussion, the general framework, the topics, and when and where it happens. It prevents the conversation from moving forward into new territory, and limits it to simply helping everyone else catch up. It also generally creates a passive approach that devalues trans stuff as being genuinely worth talking about, instead just a sort of side note, reinforces the attitude that “not being transphobic” is enough to constitute “being a trans ally”, that an absence of doing harm is equal to doing good, and a bunch of other stuff.

Likewise, waiting around for trans people to actually speak up similarly limits how seriously the importance of trans intersectionality really is. It can create the illusion that cis people don’t REALLY care, that our voices are only relevant to ourselves, and, again, keeps us sidelined as an afterthought. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of trans people are very, very intimidated from speaking BY our general erasure and dismissal within feminism. So there’s a self-perpetuating aspect, whereby the absence of trans voices, and how trans inclusion isn’t taken very seriously, reinforces the absence of trans voices and the degree to which trans inclusion isn’t taken very seriously.

It’s important to proactively speak up, so as to assert that these ARE things that are genuinely worth talking about, not simply something you ought to tack-on for the sake of the appearances, or to prevent actively harming trans people. And it needs to happen repeatedly. There need to be a number of voices, cis and trans alike, from a variety of backgrounds, repeatedly asserting that this is a significant and meaningful aspect of the conversation concerning gender and gender-based oppression for that truth to ultimately be accepted to the point that trans people become the part of the conversation we need and deserve to be.

Proactivity also permits an essential diversity and range to the kinds of discussions that take place. So long as it remains passive and reactive, it’s always going to be defined by the small range of particularly galling issues that force us into discussing it. But when we’re choosing to speak about these things, and cis people are using their cis privilege to have the topic taken seriously and listened to, we can choose what exactly we’re going to talk about and how we’re going to talk about it. Thereby, the full, incredibly broad range of trans-related discussions can become part of the conversation. Not just arguing over and over and over again about why trans women don’t “reaffirm patriarchal gender roles!” or whatever.

It also allows our conversations to not always be tainted by whatever negativity forced us into speaking.

And it shows that you actually do care about trans people. That you don’t need to be reminded that we exist and matter. Which is nice.

3) Don’t assume any given issue is strictly, or even primarily, relevant to cis women. All feminist concerns are also transgender concerns, and vice versa. There are no feminist dialogues in which trans voices “don’t belong”, or to which trans voices have “nothing to add”. There are no social issues related to gender that don’t have consequences for trans people.

Awhile back, I was invited to speak at the atheist conference Imagine No Religion in Kamloops, BC on the subject of abortion and reproductive rights. At the time, it felt really strange and a bit uncomfortable; of all the various feminist issues I could be asked to speak on, this was the one that directly impacted me the least, and I was highly nervous about how the likely entirely cisgender audience at the conference were going to react to an openly trans woman speaking about such issues. I wondered whether I was going to be perceived as having “no right” to have an opinion on the topic, given that I’ll never myself have to face the choice of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, and I internalized that question into doubt as to whether I felt I had any right to speak to the issue.

Ultimately, I resolved those doubts, and helped focus the nature of my talk, by examining what the question of reproductive rights is really about, which is the question of medical autonomy. I spoke about similarities between anti-choice arguments and the various justifications set up for trans-related gatekeeping. I talked about the horror of the state determining what happens to your body, and being subjected to endocrinological changes that you didn’t want and didn’t choose. And I talked about how the right to medical autonomy needs to remain an absolute in order to protect that right for all of us, regardless of our exact medical needs and exact anatomical configurations.

There really wasn’t any reason a transgender perspective would be “meaningless” to the question of a woman’s right to choose, because it’s about far far more than the literal, biological reality of pregnancy. It’s about patriarchy, about how women’s bodies are treated, about how we perceive sex and the sexualized aspects of bodies, and about many other things that have direct bearing upon and consequences for trans lives. Which is to say nothing of the fact that many trans people can get pregnant. Or how many nations have considered sterilization a prerequisite for legal change of sex. If that’s not a question of reproductive rights, I don’t know what is.

There was no reason I ever should have doubted my “right” to participate in a discussion of reproductive rights. Because it isn’t an exclusively “cis women’s” issue, no matter what one may assume from a superficial glance at the question.

The same holds true of numerous other issues from which trans voices are consistently excluded. Trans people DO need access to women’s shelters, to domestic abuse and rape crisis lines, to gynecological exams and mammograms and pap smears and other aspects of “women’s health”, to testicular exams and prostate checks and other aspects of “men’s health”, to planned parenthood and reproductive options and contraception and safer sex kits and everything of that kind… to a whole lot of things that we’re consistently, and often quite deliberately, cut out of. This has intense and real consequences for us, often on the scale of life and death.

And it should go without saying that transgender perspectives are both relevant and necessary to discussion of all social, cultural, political and theoretical questions of gender. Not simply the “trans question” as academically and distantly considered by cis people discussing gender, either; trans people should ourselves be permitted to offer our own perspectives in relation to ALL such questions, and be given a chance to be heard and listened to.

The inclusion of trans perspectives is not only something we deserve in terms of our own rights and needs, but it also can help illuminate important questions or considerations relevant to the rights and needs of cis women or men that were nonetheless missed, or weren’t taken seriously. We have at least as much to offer feminism as feminism has to offer us (though the latter question, what feminism can do for groups who’ve been marginalized by present understandings and treatment of gender, should always be the priority).

Never, ever assume that you, in your (necessarily) limited cisgender experience and knowledge, know when transgender perspectives aren’t really necessary to a given conversation. Assume they always are. If it’s an issue where we feel we don’t have anything to say, we’ll let you know.

4) Proactively seek out transgender voices, perspectives, and input on all issues, not simply what you regard as “trans issues” or situations where the value of such perspectives is immediately obvious to you. Come to us, rather than waiting for us to come to you.

One of the ways that marginalization operates is by making it definitively more difficult for marginalized identities to get their voices heard and noticed. This is a result of countless barriers and risks for people in marginalized positions contrasting with the privileges afforded to others in being heard and paid attention to. For instance, a woman is exposing herself to all kinds of harassment, risks, compromises and exhausting uphill struggles in deciding to launch or join a visible blog that men don’t have to face. Queer writers face additional harassment and risks that other writers don’t have to, such as potentially being outed and the consequences that can follow. These risks are compounded for trans writers, as opposed to cis writers. And people of colour are far less likely to have their views taken seriously, and considered in light of the social complexities of race, than white writers (whose vantage point is treated as the cultural “norm”). The overall effect is that it means something very different for someone in such a marginalized position to make themselves visible and heard than what it means for the privileged, and not everyone in a marginalized position, especially an intersectional one, is going to be willing to subject themselves to the risks and hassle. Especially if their chances of actually being heard and taken seriously are unclear.

This is one of the many reasons it’s never enough for any organization or space to simply decide against directly excluding marginalized voices, and then claim that alone makes them “inclusive” and “[x]-friendly”. It’s not enough to just open up your doors and then expect that those who approach you will reflect broader demographics and lead to greater “diversity”.  Proactive efforts to deliberately seek out such voices, deliberately ensure that they’re reflected in your conversation, deliberately investigate whatever subtle or “invisible” barriers might be excluding certain people or leading them to feel uneasy about participating, deliberately investigate how you might be failing to meet the needs and interests of a given demographic, deliberately and actively address those barriers and limitations and find ways to remedy them, and deliberately make sure that the wider extant barriers for marginalized voices are taken into consideration, are all necessary in order to create an actually diverse space and conversation. Much like how it’s not enough for an employer to simply claim to offer equal opportunities to all applicants and employees, and affirmative action and real, proactive policies are necessary to counteract wider social problems that disadvantage women and minorities in finding employment or being promoted.

Feminism can’t be trans-inclusive simply by quietly, passively deciding not to be actively trans-exclusive. In order for trans voices to end up genuinely included and reflected in the conversation, they need to be sought out, while feminists need to also be making a concerted effort to address its internal limitations in meeting the needs of trans people and potential trans speakers, writers, activists, etc. Efforts to be more trans-inclusive also can’t be done quietly, in such a way that trans people might simply assume that all the same exclusions and gender-policing and such are still going on. To make trans voices a part of your space or organization or discourse or whatever, you need to vocally reach out to us, do so in a way that recognizes and addresses our different risks, concerns, barriers and needs, and let us know that you want us there and are aware that we don’t have all the same privileges and safety and assurances of being heard that you might take for granted.

It might also be worth asking yourselves why you want us there, and what you’re actually offering us in exchange for our participation. Why should we want to work with you? For instance, are we going to simply be there to lend your organization the appearance of diversity and inclusivity? Are you actually interested in a trans perspective and voice, even if it ends up being critical of your pre-existing assumptions, practices and attitudes? Are we going to be tokens, or are we going to be participants? Are we going to be offered any actual responsibility and control? Are we going to be permitted leadership positions, or are things like that going to remain restricted to cis people and otherwise already-privileged participants? Are you interested in what you can do for us, or only in what we can do for you?

Additionally, this kind of proactive effort to include trans voices I’m advocating also can’t simply be restricted to situations or issues or whatever that you, or other cis people, consider to be “trans issues” or something where a trans perspective might be beneficial. If the only times you ever actively seek out trans people to be included in feminist conversation is when it’s something like doing a panel on a subject like “gender outlaws, androgyny and gender-bending in pop culture”, “gender and body modification”, or, most commonly, just “trans-feminism” or “trans… stuff”, where the relevance of including a trans perspective (or a tokenized trans presence) is immediately apparent to your cisgender perspective, then you’re not actually including trans perspectives in feminism; you’re just ghettoizing such perspectives and keeping us hemmed into particular roles and meanings that cis people have defined for us. By restricting our “inclusion” to what you’ve defined as a “trans issue” or “trans-related” issue, you’ve barred us from participation on our own terms, or offering perspectives on what we see as important. In other words, you’re not actually including our perspectives and concerns, only your own perspective of us.

To create a genuinely trans-inclusive feminism (or space, organization, event, conversation, etc.), it’s necessary to proactively seek out our inclusion, to do so with recognition of our specific circumstances and risks, permit us to be included as full and unrestricted participants, permit us the same level of responsibility and mobility and power as everyone else, and allow us to define for ourselves what our participation will be, where our perspective is of value, and what issues we wish to address.

5) Don’t treat the larger social conflict of gender as being dialectic or binary in nature. Don’t assume a unidirectional model of gender-based oppression.

This is one of those many many mistakes people can make in discussing social issues where once you notice it, it feels like it SHOULD be obvious, but nonetheless gets made all the time, even by very intelligent and otherwise conscientious people.

The “unidirectional model” is the idea that sexism operates in, well, one direction: as a top-down force of oppression by which men subjugate and control women. While this was a useful way of looking at some of the more overt kinds of patriarchy, like women being prevented from owning property or voting, being restricted to the home, and not being permitted to advance in either business or politics, a discussion of the more subtle and pervasive forms of patriarchy and sexism in our culture requires understanding sexism as a systemic problem, a very complex one, and one that is every bit as “down-top” as it is “top-down”, as much perpetuated by women as by men, as much inflicted on ourselves and one another as at the hands of those with the most immediate power, etc.

I’m not going to say anything here about “misandry” or “female privilege” or “men are just as victimized by sexism as women are!”. I find all such notions contemptible and absurd. Nonetheless, understanding sexism requires understanding that it has, at least, two facets: misogyny and oppositional sexism. Men, maleness and masculinity are all considered superior, preferable, stronger, healthier, more natural and more “normal” and “default” than women, femaleness and femininity, true. That’s the misogyny part. However, those concepts can only work and be maintained by way of initially treating gender as a binary, dialectic, oppositional thing, with men on one side and women on the other. The idea of human beings as divided into two, mutually exclusive “opposite sexes” is what I mean when I say “oppositional sexism”, and in addition to being a prerequisite for misogyny to function, it has numerous oppressive qualities all on its own, that can and do harm people across the entire “spectrum” (not actually a spectrum) of gender and sex. Men and others who are assigned male at birth, for instance, end up being much more viciously and violently reprimanded for straying outside of the expectations of their assigned gender role. This specific issue is primarily a consequence of the misogynistic devaluing of women and femininity relative to men and masculinity, but by way of oppositional sexism it ends up harming men and AMAB people the most.

Both oppositional sexism and misogyny can be subtle and pervasive, and present in very small, seemingly insignificant everyday actions. There are many forms of sexism that don’t remotely fit the model of “man subjugates women”… such as “benevolent sexism”, the various subtle acts that imply women are weak and dependent that take on the outward appearance of a kind, generous or chivalrous gesture, such as a man insisting upon opening doors or paying for the meal, regardless of a woman’s wishes. There are also numerous little codes and modes of behaviour that help prop up rape culture and the idea that men are entitled to women’s bodies or sexuality, the attitude of women’s bodies as property, the idea that women’s worth is through their beauty, the idea that women are naturally domestic, etc. And while in all of these subtle kinds of sexism are, in their misogynistic aspect, meant towards privileging men, the oppositional aspect will end up having a reflection in the expectations that are placed on men and those so-assigned that can, in turn, harm them (and perhaps be mistaken as an issue of “misandry” or “female privilege”).

And, of course, this subtle, discursive oppositional framework really fucks over trans people and anyone else who can’t be fitted into that structure.

The trouble is that feminism often sort of shoots itself in the foot, and shoots trans people in the back (or the face), by playing along with the idea of “men” and “women” as fundamentally different and oppositionally defined concepts. Many feminists will talk about “female socialization” as some kind of universal experience, or talk about female “energy”, or the inherent psychological and emotional qualities of women as opposed to men, or (with self-awareness or not) discuss a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic between male “masters” and female “slaves” (which need to position ALL human beings as fitting into one of the two supposed classes), or discuss female subjugation and misogyny but totally ignore all other forms of gender-based oppression, or ignore the ways that women themselves participate in systems of both misogyny and oppositional sexism, or talk about how the presence or absence of a vagina or uterus or penis or the capacity to give birth or the capacity to menstruate or any other sexually dimorphic anatomical quality is the “key” difference between men and women that explains patriarchy…

…or sometimes even just tiny little things like naming their feminist site “The XXsomethingerather!”, or snarkily saying “this conversation is only for people with vaginas!”, or otherwise “innocently” using certain specific (but by no means universal) biological aspects of most women to mean “women” in a general sense.

All of that is destructive. All of it is cissexist. No matter whether you meant it to be or not.

I know that the more complex and nuanced a discussion of gender becomes, the harder it becomes to sell to people. I know that a lot of feminists feel we’re losing energy and momentum because we no longer have a “key” issue to push forward, like the vote or equal pay. I know that a lot of the time it really DOES seem like an issue of men vs women, with men on one side, privileged and powerful, and women on the other, constantly having to fight to have our voices heard and our minds respected and our bodies treated as our own. I know. And I know that fights are easier to fight when you have a nice, clearly defined enemy. But what are we fighting for?

We’re fighting for a better world, right? A better understanding of gender? And a world where gender and sex don’t end up defining our social position, and our options in life, and in which they are never exploited as a means to oppress or subjugate or silence or coerce another human being?

Well, if that’s the case, then we need to do our job right. And we need to be addressing the actual complex, nuanced, tangled, often seemingly contradictory, often outright baffling realities of gender and gender-based oppression, not just a simplistic mock-up thereof.

Remember that sexism isn’t just about men oppressing women. It’s mostly about human beings oppressing each other and themselves. It works in every possible direction.

Bonus Points:

Remember, when including trans perspectives, that intersectionality doesn’t stop there. Which trans perspectives are you including?

Thanks for listening! And pre-emptive thanks to anyone/everyone who makes the effort.

BY VICTORIA LAW, truthout.org

What do a nineteen-year-old lesbian from New Jersey, a 23-year-old trans woman in Minneapolis and a 31-year-old mother in Florida have in common? All three were attacked, all three fought back and all three were arrested. All three are currently in prison while their attackers remain free. Oh, yes, and all three are black women.

Marissa Alexander is a 31-year-old mother of three. She is also a survivor of violence at the hands of her ex, Rico Gray. In 2009, Alexander obtained a restraining order against Gray. Learning that she was pregnant, she amended it to remove the ban on contact between her and Gray while maintaining the rest of the restraining order.

On August 1, 2010, nine days after Alexander had given birth to their daughter, Gray attacked her in her own home. “He assaulted me, shoving, strangling and holding me against my will, preventing me from fleeing all while I begged for him to leave,” Alexander recounted in an open letter to supporters. Alexander escaped into the garage, but realized that she had forgotten the keys to her truck and that the garage’s door opener was not working. She retrieved her gun, which was legally registered, and re-entered her home to either escape or grab her cell phone to call for help. “He came into the kitchen … and realized I was unable to leave … he yelled, ‘Bitch I will kill you!’ and charged toward me. In fear and a desperate attempt, I lifted my weapon up, turned away and discharged a single shot in the wall up in the ceiling.” Gray called the police and reported that Alexander had shot at him and his sons. Alexander was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Alexander attempted to invoke Stand Your Ground, but a pre-trial judge ruled that she could have escaped her attacker through the front or back doors of her home. During her trial, the jury was not allowed to see several letters, written by Gray’s former wives, girlfriends and in-laws, that recounted his history of abuse, including pistol-whippings, beatings, stripping them of their clothing and super-gluing door locks on them. Several letters also recounted instances in which Gray called the police after he had attacked them, claiming that they had attacked him. (In one instance, Gray stabbed himself with a fork and asked his younger son to tell the police that his girlfriend had done it.) In a sixty-six page deposition, Gray admitted to abusing all five of the women with whom he had children, including Alexander.

Instead of taking these facts into consideration, prosecutor Angela Corey added Florida’s 10-20-LIFE sentencing enhancement, mandating a 20-year minimum sentence when a firearm is discharged.

Not an Anomaly: Race, Gender and the Justice System

Alexander’s case is not an anomaly. Other women of color have defended themselves only to find the legal system more eager to prosecute and punish them than their assailants.

In August 2006, nineteen-year-old Patreese Johnson and six friends from Newark, New Jersey, took the train to New York’s West Village, a neighborhood historically known for its LGBTQ friendliness. As the women walked down the street, they were sexually propositioned by a man named Wayne Buckle. Buckle followed them, threatening to rape them and then physically attacked, choking one, ripping hair from their scalps and spitting on them. The women defended themselves and, at some point, were assisted by two unknown men. During the altercation, Buckle was stabbed. The women were arrested while the men left the scene.

All seven were black lesbians. In addition, three were masculine-appearing. “Their treatment [by the media and legal system] has been reflective of what they look like,” noted one supporter who needed to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals at work. Johnson agrees, writing recently, “Me being black and young, the jury, judge and DA’s minds was already made up.” (Letter, July 18, 2012.)

Police refused to credit the women’s statements, those of other witnesses and, ultimately, that of Buckle himself, who stated that the two men were responsible for stabbing him. Both the media and the prosecution framed them as a “lesbian wolf pack” and “killer lesbians.” Both media and prosecution also played on racialized fears around gang violence: Although none of the women had ever been in conflict with the law, media and prosecutors described them as a “gang.” In addition, neither the judge nor the prosecutor differentiated between the charge of “gang assault” (two or more people acting in concert to cause injury) and gang membership.

Three of the women accepted plea bargains and served six months; the remaining four – Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Renata Hill and Patreese Johnson – became known as the New Jersey Four; they pled not guilty. They received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to eleven years in prison.

Upon appeal, charges against Dandridge were dismissed while Brown and Hill were granted a retrial and subsequently accepted plea agreements. Johnson’s sentence was reduced from eleven to eight years. She remains in prison today. Dwayne Buckle was never arrested nor charged for attacking the women.

As reported last year in Truthout, 23-year-old CeCe McDonald, a young black transgender woman, and her friends were walking to the grocery store in Minneapolis when she was first verbally harassed, then physically attacked by the white patrons standing outside a bar. During the attack, a bar patron smashed a glass into McDonald’s face, slicing her cheek. As more people joined in the attack, Dean Schmitz, who had instigated the verbal harassment, was stabbed and later died in the hospital. McDonald was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The woman who smashed glass into McDonald’s face was never arrested or charged.

During pre-trial motions, the judge ruled against McDonald’s ability to introduce evidence showing that the attack against her was motivated by her race and gender identity: Both Schmitz’s swastika and his three previous convictions for violent assault were ruled inadmissible. The judge also refused to allow an expert witness to testify about the pervasive and systemic violence faced by trans people on a daily basis. (Letter from CeCe McDonald, July 19, 2012.)

Faced with second-degree murder charges, a hostile court and the possibility of twenty to forty years, McDonald pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter due to negligence and was sentenced to forty-one months in prison. “She [also] has to pay for her attacker’s funeral,” noted Billy Navarro of the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition and a member of her support committee. (Interview, July 26, 2012.)

These cases – and their verdicts – reflect an all-too-common reality in the United States: When women, particularly women of color, defend themselves, they often find themselves assaulted twice – first by their attacker, then by the legal system. The zealous prosecution, as well as the lack of charges against their attackers, reflects the pervasive and socially sanctioned violence against women, particularly women of color and the prevailing notion that women should not fight back. “Me being female, I wasn’t supposed to fight back,” Johnson noted. (Letter, July 18, 2012.)

“People Were Outraged and Wanted to Get Involved”

Shortly after the New Jersey Four’s arrest made headlines, FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment), an LGBT youth of color group in the West Village, organized efforts to secure lawyers, raise money for legal expenses, attend the trial, write letters and send care packages to the women while they were in prison. In California, queer people of color formed the Bay Area NJ4 Solidarity Committee, which created a web site to provide up-to-date information about the women’s appeals, helped fundraise and stayed in contact with the women throughout their ordeal. Both groups continue to support Patreese Johnson during her incarceration.

In Minneapolis, those who worked with trans youth took note of McDonald’s arrest. “It was clear immediately that she needed a lot of support,” stated Navarro. Within the first weeks, supporters secured lawyers and formed the CeCe McDonald Support Committee. They publicized the case, gathering over 15,000 signatures and dozens of letters from organizations and prominent individuals worldwide demanding that the charges against McDonald be dropped. They then presented these to the prosecutor’s office.

The Committee continues coordinating public support during McDonald’s incarceration. Recently, despite McDonald’s prescription and court order to receive twenty milligrams of hormones, prison staff were administering only six milligrams. Supporters from around the world flooded the prison with phone calls demanding that McDonald receive the full twenty milligrams, forcing the prison to follow the prescription order.

“The support from everyone everywhere keeps me motivated,” McDonald wrote in a recent letter. “It showed that people care not only about these issues that are so easily ‘swept under the rug’ by society, but about how I am doing and keeping me afloat.” (Letter, July 19, 2012.)

Women of Color, Self-Defense and Public Support in the 1970s and Today

In 1974, two men took Inez Garcia from her California home into a nearby alley. There, one man raped her while the other blocked the exit. Garcia later shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape. She was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Her case attracted extensive support, especially from those in the women’s movements. Many were outraged that Garcia had been arrested while her rapist remained free. Supporters publicized her case at concerts, political meetings, church services and any venues where they might find potential sympathizers. They packed the courtroom, where the judge instructed the jurors not to consider the rape. Garcia was convicted and sentenced to five years to life in prison.

Supporters continued to publicize her case, tying it to the larger issue of a woman’s right to defend herself against assault. They approached feminist lawyer Susan Jordan to take over Garcia’s defense. Jordan appealed the case and had the conviction reversed because of the judge’s instructions not to consider the rape. At the retrial, Jordan made rape an integral part of the case; Garcia was acquitted. “There was a change in consciousness going on in the country. We rode the wave of it,” Jordan reflected in a 2007 interview. (Interview with Susan Jordan, June 18, 2007.)

The cases of Marissa Alexander, Patreese Johnson and CeCe McDonald, while more well-known than those of many other women of color trapped in the legal system for fighting back, have not achieved the same level of support that Inez Garcia received three decades earlier. Why not?

“The groups that came together [around the NJ4 case] were grassroots queer groups of color,” recalled a supporter. “The larger LGBTQ organizations are fighting for gay marriage, not what youth are going through. And people are scared of women who stand up for themselves and fight back.”

Katie Burgess, director of the Trans Youth Support Network and part of McDonald’s support committee, has a similar opinion: “CeCe is at the intersection of multiple oppressions. On the local front, we saw people come together around the issue like never before – social workers, insurrectionary anarchists, lawyers, youth, GLBT people of color groups came together and built coalitions. But of course, racism still exists in LGBT communities. Homophobia and transphobia still exist in communities of color. Sometime people don’t want to recognize the whole picture.” (Interview, July 30, 2012.)

Navarro agrees that racism and transphobia kept many away: “CeCe doesn’t get the same level of support because most people see someone that they’ve been taught to be afraid of, not someone’s daughter.”

However, both Burgess and Navarros acknowledge that the support McDonald received dramatically affected the outcome of her case. “CeCe being a young African-American trans woman living in poverty made them [the prosecution] think that she didn’t have the resources to defend or advocate for herself,” Navarro stated. “Not until just before the trial did they realize how much support she had.” Navarro also noted that McDonald was offered several plea bargains and, with each plea bargain, the amount of time diminished. (Interview, July 26, 2012.)

Both Johnson and McDonald recognize that support needs to extend beyond their individual cases to address the broader issues of race, class, gender and the justice system: “I would hate to think that the law is going to continue putting our women in prison for defending themselves,” Johnson wrote recently. “Support me by making a change, starting with one’s self. It’s not really about me; it’s about women overall.” (Letter, July 18, 2012.)

McDonald has similar thoughts: “The real issues are the ones that affect all prisoners. People should get involved in changing policies that keep people in prisons, like exclusion from employment, housing, public assistance,” she wrote. “These are just a few things that will keep people out of prisons and lead to the dismantling of these facilities.” (Letter, July 19, 2012.)

While the legal process is over for both Johnson and McDonald, Alexander has not given up. Her first husband, Lincoln Alexander and her sister Helena Jenkins, have formed the Committee to Free Marissa Alexander. Groups and individuals have come together in Florida and across the country to continue the campaign for her freedom.

As seen with CeCe McDonald and the New Jersey Four, support can make a difference. As McDonald stated, one month after her sentencing, “I didn’t let this incident diminish me. Instead, it made me grow mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Not just for myself, but for my friends, families and supporters who tell me that my struggle against discrimination and me defending myself give them hope and motivation to be strong, to fight for their beliefs and to be the people they want to be instead of hiding or conforming. So this isn’t just for me, it’s for all of us!” (Letter, July 19, 2012.)

supportcece.wordpress.com

Addameer calls on activists and people of conscience to stand in solidarity with all political prisoners and join Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Organization’s upcoming global campaign against administrative detention.

Over 4,743 Palestinians are currently detained by Israel; 10 of them women, 193 of them children, and 178 of them held under administrative detention, a decrepit policy that Israel uses to hold Palestinians on secret information indefinitely without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.

Not only are these prisoners held arbitrarily, but Israel’s use of administrative detention violates several international standards, such as deporting Palestinians from the occupied territory to Israel, denying regular family visits and failing to take into account the best interests of child detainees as required under international law.

We need your support to break their chains and the silence on administrative detention.

Today, Israel has outsourced security for prisons where Palestinians are held to a British-Danish company named G4S. Along with the Israeli Prison Service, G4S is responsible for the harsh conditions the prisoners faced during the historic 2012 hunger strikes that thousands of Palestinians participated in, including two hunger strikers that neared death in protest of their arbitrary detention, Khader Adnan and Hana Al-Shalabi. G4S is also complicit in Israel’s detention of nearly one-third of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006, and for dozens of human rights defenders being arrested every year for participating in popular resistance.

The government of Israel should release all administrative detainees, and in the meantime, all administrative detainees must be granted their rights in accordance with international law.

Addameer supports the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against G4S to end its complicity in detaining administrative detainees and  to put pressure on the Israeli government to release the prisoners. Addameer calls on solidarity organizations, individuals and human rights organizations around the world to join our End Administrative Detention campaign launching on 17 April 2013.

TAKE ACTION!

You can help us pressure the Israeli government to release the prisoners by:

• Participating in a mass day of mobilization in your city on 17 April, the annual Palestinian Prisoners Day.

• Organizing an “End Administrative Detention” week on 17-24 April 2013 in your city or university campus using Addameer’s forthcoming campaign materials.

• Joining a local G4S BDS campaign in your city.

• Raising awareness about administrative detention in your community using our forthcoming Activist Toolkit.

june11.org

The third anniversary of the international day of solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and other long-term anarchist prisoners is quickly approaching!

June 11th began as an international day of solidarity with long-term anarchist prisoner Jeff “Free” Luers in 2004. At the time, Jeff was serving 22+ years. Infuriated by the environmental devastation he saw occurring on a global scale, Jeff torched three SUVs at a car dealership in Eugene, OR. The sentence imposed on him was meant to send a clear message to others who were angered by capitalism’s continued war on the Earth’s ecosystems – and to those who were willing to take action to put a stop to it.

After years of struggle, Jeff and his legal team won a reduction in his sentence and he was released from prison in December 2009. But in theyears intervening Jeff’s arrest and release, the FBI had carried out a series of indictments and arrests in an attempt to devastate the radical environmental and anarchist communities. Two of the people caught up in this maelstrom of repression were Eric McDavid and Marie Mason.

Marie Mason and Eric McDavid share the unfortunate distinction of having the longest standing sentences of any environmental prisoners in the United States (22+ years and 20 years). Please join us in an international day of solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and other long-term anarchist prisoners on every June 11th. This is a time to remember our friends who are in prison – who are continuing their struggles on the inside. This is a time to continue and strengthen the very work for which Eric and Marie are now serving so much time – to struggle against capitalism, ecological devastation, and the ever more diffuse forms of control in this prison society.

Free Marie and Eric! Free all prisoners!

Prison
BY MARILYN BUCK

no grass
no trees
no children throwing stones
into puddles
no laughter
no tears

no peace
no silence
no world of colors
no sun
no moon
no weather at all

Living without
blowing winds
gentle rains
day or night
my internal clock
is deprived of nature’s power

There is only the beat of my heart

Ghosts

BY MARGE PIERCY

How often we navigate by what is no
longer there.  Turn right where the post
office used to be.  She lives in a condo
above where the bakery blew sweet
yeasty smells into the street.  A nail
salon now.

Kelsey Hayes had a factory there
on Livernois where our neighbors
worked.  A foundry spat out metal
where the strip club spits neon
now and loud skanky music
into the night.

Rows of little cheap houses replaced
by a few McMansions.  Where did
all those people go?  The workers
in factories, in tool and dye shops,
the shoemakers and tailors, mom
and pop eateries?

You can be plunked down in Anywhere
U.S.A. and see the same row of stores
Target, Walmart, Gap, Toys-R-Us.
Exit the superhighway: McDonalds,
Taco Bell, Burger King, Hardees,
you haven’t moved.

That’s where the school was: see,
it’s condos now.  That’s the church
the parish closed to pay for priests’
sex.  China got the shoe factory.
Urban renewal turned the old neighbor-
hood to dust.

Some things we make better and some
are destroyed by greed and bad
politics.  We live in the wake
of decisions we didn’t share in,
survivors of a vast lethal typhoon
of power.”

(Marge Piercy is the author of 18 poetry books, most recently ‘The Hungry Moon: New Selected Poems, 1980-2010’ from Knopf)

(Monthly Review – March 2013)

[Note: Issue 23, coming out in the winter, will be a special issue on combating sexism, homophobia and transphobia in our movements. This theme was suggested to us by political prisoner David Gilbert, and he is helping Jaan and I compile material to further the discussion.

We know that right-wing backlash against the rights of women, queer people and trans people is growing right now. But as revolutionaries we must also struggle against these tendencies in our own movements and communities. Many of us internalized a lot of poisonous ideas growing up in this society, and we have to confront and work to change attitudes that contribute to the oppression of others. I myself have been working to be a better ally to the trans people in my life.

I hope that the following letter from David will inspire you to reflect on your own attitudes and experiences, and that you will send us some writings for Issue 23 – and for future issues, as I’m sure this important dialogue will continue.   – Sara Falconer]

BY DAVID GILBERT

Dear Brothers,

There is no way we can be revolutionaries, no way we can stand with humanity for liberation, without actively combating male supremacy. That imperative requires both a political program against patriarchy and concerted struggle against sexism within ourselves. We all grew up in this society so, even with our passionate ideals, problems with ego, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism within ourselves are inevitable. What is inexcusable is to fail to engage in sincere and open-hearted efforts to change.

It has been extremely upsetting to have heard, even with my limited contact with the outside activist communities, of several incidents of sexual assault and then – to add bitter insult to monstrous injury – the frequent failures to have a process for holding perpetrators accountable and for setting unmistakable standards for activist communities. We are fighting for a world without sexual assault, abuse, coercion – how can we allow that to continue within our ranks?

Men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, the violations and the denial of self-determination involved, parallels the ideology and practice of imperialism. Each attack does vicious harm to a sister, while the reality of sexual assault is the ferocious spearhead of the much broader offensive against women’s fully active and assertive role in our movements, which we sorely need for the colossal challenges we face. Also, our failure to develop a process to stop such crimes is corrosive to our own humanity.

In the 1960s we started from nowhere in terms of dealing with patriarchy – and nowhere meant the continued dominance of male supremacy. Then, women’s collective leadership around feminism and anti-imperialism, although often faced with reactionary resistance from men, won major advances.

As dramatic as those changes were, they of course weren’t nearly enough; on top of that we have evidently failed in our responsibility to pass on hard-won lessons to the post-Seattle, 1999, generation of activists. If we don’t do better on this, we leave a lethal hole in the heart of our movement.

In my own experience, the most fruitful response to women’s liberation came in the form of Men Against Sexism groups – if they weren’t just a place to talk about our feelings but if we also consciously grappled with sexism, checked-in with and sought guidance from feminists, and took on solidarity work such as childcare and/or educating other men and boys.

Today, we may want and need additional formats, for example, to fight the oppression of those who are gender nonconforming. Whatever the forms, concerted struggle against patriarchy, with male supremacy as a central axis, is absolutely necessary.

Male supremacy is extremely deep-seated in history and in society. Change doesn’t come easily and won’t always be comfortable. As difficult as it may seem, advances on this front can stop the brutality of men’s assaults on women in our communities and help create a welcoming climate for their full participation. We can’t have a real movement, we can’t possibly be successful, without the invaluable contributions and leadership women can provide. Such advances can also make us men more whole, more loving human beings.

White supremacy, male supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, class rule, and imperialism are powerful pillars of oppression. We have to dismantle them all to clear the ground to build the more humane and sustainable world that is so urgently needed.

One love,
David Gilbert
(anti-imperialist political prisoner)

The corporate media won’t report on it, so follow and find livestreams on Twitter: #resistRNC #marchontheRNC #OccupTheRNC #frnc,@OccupyRNC and @OccupyTampa. The protest will continue throughout the week. Nonviolent direct action marches will take place every day at 10 am as an alternative to the official, barbed-wire enclosed “event zone” (cage) declared by the city and police to keep protesters far away from the eyes of the media, while the wealthy are given lavish parties and the ears of the politicians inside the heavily-guarded walls.

Those who come to demonstrate at the RNC do not come to confront you. They come to confront:

• those who give you your orders, our Elected Officials.

• those who give them their orders, the Power Elite.

We, police officers and protesters alike, should be standing together to remind our government that they work for us, the people. That it is WE THE PEOPLE who elect them, and we who give them their orders.

You have been told that we are coming to commit acts of violence and destruction. We are not. We utilize peaceful means to promote peaceful ends and to stand up for justice…social, economic and environmental justice.

You have been told that we are coming to fight the police. We are not. You are being abused right along with us. It is the Power Elite we are after. They are screwing over all of us and laugh at us when we fight one another.

It’s time we stood together. We know who the real enemy is, and its neither you or us. So it’s pointless to fight one another.

If you are ordered to assault a non-violent peaceful crowd, we ask you to defy your orders. Stand for justice. It is our sincere hope that you allow the demonstrators to do what they come to do, peacefully protest an unjust system. We stand for justice.

-resistRNC
resistrnc.org

BY SOME OAKLAND ANTAGONISTS
May 2012 from bayofrage.com

For those of us in Oakland, “Occupy Wall Street” was always a strange fit. While much of the country sat eerily quiet in the years before the Hot Fall of 2011, a unique rebelliousness that regularly erupted in militant antagonisms with the police was already taking root in the streets of the Bay. From numerous anti-police riots triggered by the execution of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009, to the wave of anti-austerity student occupations in late 2009 and early 2010, to the Native protest encampment at Glen Cove in 2011, to the the sequence of Anonymous BART disruptions in the month before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, our greater metropolitan area re-emerged in recent years as a primary hub of struggle in this country. The intersection at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland was, more often than not, “ground zero” for these conflicts.

If we had chosen to follow the specific trajectory prescribed by Adbusters and the Zucotti-based organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we would have staked out our local Occupy camp somewhere in the heart of the capitol of West Coast capital, as a beachhead in the enemy territory of San Francisco’s financial district. Some did this early on, following in the footsteps of the growing list of other encampments scattered across the country like a colorful but confused archipelago of anti-financial indignation. According to this logic, it would make no sense for the epicenter of the movement to emerge in a medium sized, proletarian city on the other side of the bay.

We intentionally chose a different path based on a longer trajectory and rooted in a set of shared experiences that emerged directly from recent struggles. Vague populist slogans about the 99%, savvy use of social networking, shady figures running around in Guy Fawkes masks, none of this played any kind of significant role in bringing us to the forefront of the Occupy movement. In the rebel town of Oakland, we built a camp that was not so much the emergence of a new social movement, but the unprecedented convergence of preexisting local movements and antagonistic tendencies all looking for a fight with capital and the state while learning to take care of each other and our city in the most radical ways possible.

This is what we began to call The Oakland Commune: that dense network of new found affinity and rebelliousness that sliced through seemingly impenetrable social barriers like never before. Our “war machine and our care machine” as one comrade put it. No cops, no politicians, plenty of “autonomous actions”; the Commune materialized for one month in liberated Oscar Grant Plaza at the corner of 14th & Broadway. Here we fed each other, lived together and began to learn how to actually care for one another while launching unmediated assaults on our enemies: local government, the downtown business elite and transnational capital. These attacks culminated with the General Strike of November 2 and subsequent West Coast Port Blockade.

In their repeated attacks on Occupy Oakland, the local decolonize tendency is in some ways correct.[1] Occupy Wall Street and the movement of the 99% become very problematic when applied to a city such as Oakland and reek of white liberal politics imposed from afar on a diverse population already living under brutal police occupation. What our decolonizing comrades fail to grasp (intentionally or not) is that the rebellion which unfolded in front of City Hall in Oscar Grant Plaza does not trace its roots back to September 17, 2011 when thousands of 99%ers marched through Wall Street and set up camp in Lower Manhattan. The Oakland Commune was born much earlier on January 7, 2009 when those youngsters climbed on top of an OPD cruiser and started kicking in the windshield to the cheers of the crowd. Thus the name of the Commune’s temporarily reclaimed space where anti-capitalist processes of decolonization were unleashed: Oscar Grant Plaza.

Why then did it take nearly three years for the Commune to finally come out into the open and begin to unveil its true potential? Maybe it needed time to grow quietly, celebrating the small victories and nursing itself back to health after bitter defeats such as the depressing end of the student movement on March 4, 2010. Or maybe it needed to see its own reflection in Tahrir, Plaza del Sol and Syntagma before having the confidence to brazenly declare war on the entire capitalist order. One thing is for sure. Regardless of Occupy Wall Street’s shortcomings and the reformist tendencies that latched on to the movement of the 99%, the fact that some kind of open revolt was rapidly spreading like a virus across the rest of the country is what gave us the political space in Oakland to realize our rebel dreams. This point cannot be overemphasized. We are strongest when we are not alone. We will be isolated and crushed if Oakland is contained as some militant outlier while the rest of the country sits quiet and our comrades in other cities are content consuming riot porn emerging from our streets while cheering us on and occasionally coming to visit, hoping to get their small piece of the action.

The Movement

For a whole generation of young people in this country, these past six months have been the first taste of what it means to struggle as part of a multiplying and complex social movement that continually expands the realm of possibilities and pushes participants through radicalization processes that normally take years. The closest recent equivalent is probably the first (and most vibrant) wave of North American anti-globalization mobilizations from late 1999 through the first half of 2001. This movement also brought a wide range of tendencies together under a reformist banner of “Fair Trade” & “Global Justice” while simultaneously pointing towards a systemic critique of global capitalism and a militant street politics of disruption.

The similarities end there and this break with the past is what Occupy got right. Looking back over those heady days at the turn of the millennia (or the waves of summit hopping that followed), the moments of actually living in struggle and experiencing rupture in front of one’s eyes were few and far between. They usually unfolded during a mass mobilization in the middle of one “National Security Event” or another in some city on the other side of the country (or world!). The affinities developed during that time were invaluable, but cannot compare to the seeds of resistance that were sown simultaneously in hundreds of urban areas this past Fall.

It makes no sense to overly fetishize the tactic of occupations, no more than it does to limiting resistance exclusively to blockades or clandestine attacks. Yet the widespread emergence of public occupations qualitatively changed what it means to resist. For contemporary American social movements, it is something new to liberate space that is normally policed to keep the city functioning smoothly as a wealth generating machine and transform it into a node of struggle and rebellion. To do this day after day, rooted in the city where you live and strengthening connections with neighbors and comrades, is a first taste of what it truly means to have a life worth living. For those few months in the fall, American cities took on new geographies of the movement’s making and rebels began to sketch out maps of coming insurrections and revolts.

This was the climate that the Oakland Commune blossomed within. In those places and moments where Occupy Wall Street embodied these characteristics as opposed to the reformist tendencies of the 99%’s nonviolent campaign to fix capitalism, the movement itself was a beautiful thing. Little communes came to life in cities and towns near and far. Those days have now passed but the consequences of millions having felt that solidarity, power and freedom will have long lasting and extreme consequences.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the movement is now decomposing and that we are now, more or less, alone, passing that empty park or plaza on the way to work (or looking for work) which seemed only yesterday so loud and colorful and full of possibilities.

All of the large social movements in this country following the anti-globalization period have heated up quickly, bringing in millions before being crushed or co-opted equally as quickly. The anti-war movement brought millions out in mass marches in the months before bombs began falling over Baghdad but was quickly co-opted into an “Anybody but Bush” campaign just in time for the 2004 election cycle. The immigrant rights movement exploded during the spring of 2006, successfully stopping the repressive and racist HR4437 legislation by organizing the largest protest in U.S. history (and arguably the closest thing we have ever seen to a nation-wide general strike) on May 1 of that year [2]. The movement was quickly scared off the streets by a brutal wave of ICE raids and deportations that continue to this day. Closer to home, the anti-austerity movement that swept through California campuses in late 2009 escalated rapidly during the fall through combative building occupations across the state. But by March 4, 2010, the movement had been successfully split apart by repressing the militant tendencies and trapping the more moderate ones in an impotent campaign to lobby elected officials in Sacramento. Such is the rapid cycle of mobilization and decomposition for social movements in late capitalist America.

The Decomposition

So what then killed Occupy? The 99%ers and reactionary liberals will quickly point to those of us in Oakland and our counterparts in other cites who wave the black flag as having alienated the masses with our “Black Bloc Tactics” and extremist views on the police and the economy. Many militants will just as quickly blame the sinister forces of co-optation, whether they be the trade union bureaucrats, the 99% Spring nonviolence training seminars or the array of pacifying social justice non-profits. Both of these positions fundamentally miss the underlying dynamic that has been the determining factor in the outcome thus far: all of the camps were evicted by the cops. Every single one.

All of those liberated spaces where rebellious relationships, ideas and actions could proliferate were bulldozed like so many shanty towns across the world that stand in the way of airports, highways and Olympic arenas. The sad reality is that we are not getting those camps back. Not after power saw the contagious militancy spreading from Oakland and other points of conflict on the Occupy map and realized what a threat all those tents and cardboard signs and discussions late into the night could potentially become.

No matter how different Occupy Oakland was from the rest of Occupy Wall Street, its life and death were intimately connected with the health of the broader movement. Once the camps were evicted, the other major defining feature of Occupy, the general assemblies, were left without an anchor and have since floated into irrelevance as hollow decision making bodies that represent no one and are more concerned with their own reproduction than anything else. There have been a wide range of attempts here in Oakland at illuminating a path forward into the next phase of the movement. These include foreclosure defense, the port blockades, linking up with rank and file labor to fight bosses in a variety of sectors, clandestine squatting and even neighborhood BBQs. All of these are interesting directions and have potential. Yet without being connected to the vortex of a communal occupation, they become isolated activist campaigns. None of them can replace the essential role of weaving together a rebel social fabric of affinity and camaraderie that only the camps have been able to play thus far.

May 1 confirmed the end of the national Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the best opportunity the movement had to reestablish the occupations, and yet it couldn’t. Nowhere was this more clear than in Oakland as the sun set after a day of marches, pickets and clashes. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that tents would start going up and the camp would reemerge in the evening of that long day. The hundreds of riot police backed by armored personnel carriers and SWAT teams carrying assault rifles made no secret of their intention to sweep the plaza clear after all the “good protesters” scurried home, making any reoccupation physically impossible. It was the same on January 28 when plans for a large public building occupation were shattered in a shower of flash bang grenades and 400 arrests, just as it was on March 17 in Zucotti Park when dreams of a new Wall Street camp were clubbed and pepper sprayed to death by the NYPD. Any hopes of a spring offensive leading to a new round of space reclamations and liberated zones has come and gone. And with that, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland are now dead.

The Future

If one had already come to terms with Occupy’s passing, May 1 could actually be viewed as an impressive success. No other 24 hour period in recent memory has unleashed such a diverse array of militancy in cities across the country. From the all day street fighting in Oakland, to the shield bloc in LA, to the courageous attempt at a Wildcat March in New York, to the surprise attack on the Mission police station in San Francisco, to the anti-capitalist march in New Orleans, to the spectacular trashing of Seattle banks and corporate chains by black flag wielding comrades, the large crowds which took to the streets on May 1 were no longer afraid of militant confrontations with police and seemed relatively comfortable with property destruction. This is an important turning point which suggests that the tone and tactics of the next sequence will be quite different from those of last fall.

Yet the consistent rhythm and resonance of resistance that the camps made possible has not returned. We are once again wading through a depressing sea of everyday normality waiting for the next spectacular day of action to come and go in much the same way as comrades did a decade ago in the anti-globalization movement or the anti-war movement. In the Bay Area, the call to strike was picked up by nurses and ferry workers who picketed their respective workplaces on May 1 along with the longshoremen who walked off the job for the day. This display of solidarity is impressive considering the overall lack of momentum in the movement right now. Still, it was not enough of an interruption in capital’s daily flows to escalate out of a day of action and into a general strike like we saw on November 2.

And thus we continue on through this quieter period of uncertainty. We still occasionally catch glimpses of the Commune in those special moments when friends and comrades successfully break the rules and start self organizing to take care of one another while simultaneously launching attacks against those who profit from mass immiseration.

We saw this off and on during the actions of May 1, or in the two occupations of the building at 888 Turk Street in San Francisco or most recently on the occupied farmland that was temporarily liberated from the University of California before being evicted by UCPD riot police a few days ago. But with the inertia of the Fall camps nearly depleted, the fierce but delicate life of our Commune relies more and more on the vibrancy of the rebel social relationships which have always been its foundation.

The task ahead of us in Oakland and beyond is to search out and nurture new means of finding each other. We are quickly reaching the point where the dead weight of Occupy threatens to drag down the Commune into the dust bin of history. We need to breathe new life into our network of rebellious relationships that does not rely on the Occupy Oakland general assembly or the array of movement protagonists who have emerged to represent the struggle.

This is by no means an argument against assemblies or for a retreat back into the small countercultural ghettos that keep us isolated and irrelevant. On the contrary, we need more public assemblies that take different forms and experiment with themes, styles of decision making (or lack there of) and levels of affinity.

We need new ways to reclaim space and regularize a contagious rebel spirit rooted in our specific urban contexts while breaking a losing cycle of attempted occupations followed by state repression that the movement has now fallen into. Most of all, we need desperately to stay connected with comrades old and new and not let these relationships completely decompose. This will determine the health of the Commune and ultimately its ability to effectively wage war on our enemies in the struggles to come.

Notes

[1] The decolonize tendency emerged in Oakland and elsewhere as a people of color and indigenous led initiative within the Occupy movement to confront the deep colonialist roots of contemporary oppression and exploitation. Decolonize Oakland publicly split with Occupy on December 5, 2011 after failing to pass a proposal in the Occupy Oakland general assembly to change the name of the local movement to Decolonize Oakland. For more information on this split see the ‘Escalating Identity’ pamphlet: escalatingidentity.wordpress.com

[2] The demonstrations on May 1, 2006, called El Gran Paro Estadounidense or The Great American Boycott, were the climax of a nationwide series of mobilizations that had begun two months earlier with large marches in Chicago and Los Angeles as well as spontaneous high school walkouts in California and beyond. Millions took to the streets across the country that May 1, with an estimated two million marching in Los Angeles alone. Entire business districts in immigrant neighborhoods or where immigrants made up the majority of workers shut down for the day in what some called “A Day Without an Immigrant”.

BY COYOTE

There is no time better than right now to take a deeper look at self, life and struggle. Many of us in the struggle have long resisted before we even knew there was a struggle. There’s something inside of us; like a fire! But where does it come from? How did we get like this; I mean what made us so honorable to carry this fire inside of us? For most of us, this rebellious spirit, of course, stems from some form of abuse or injustice in our pasts, or from our early childhood, or something; we are who we are for a reason. Well, for lots of reasons actually. Once you know yourself, you can only become strengthened and empowered through this understanding. I speak of it here, because it’s important to understand what it is that has cultivated us into the rebels and warriors we are, especially now that we know and see who and what it is – this terrible beast – that we are up against.

Sometimes we have to go through our own personal strife before we can again be awakened to the ultimate struggle. I think this is the critical importance of understanding ourselves and our inherent connection to humanity, liberty and struggle. We have to go through things in life, stumble, fall, and then pick ourselves back up and ask ourselves what just happened and why, before we can really start to understand things, and somewhere in all of this turmoil we begin to see that there’s a connection between one’s own personal life and experiences and the lives and experiences of humanity as a whole. And that’s when we realize that we’re not alone in this struggle. We are a part of something. Something that’s bigger and greater than we ever understood.

And now that our eyes are opened, we must stay strong, stay focused and we must stay committed. It’s not just about “me” anymore, now it’s about “us”. Solidarity is what we have, freedom is what we strive for.