Avory Faucette is a genderqueer radical feminist activist and writer.  Zie writes at the blog Radically Queer and works at the National Center for Transgender Equality.  Hir work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, and other identities.  Zie is particularly interested in non-binary gender and sexuality.  Zie is also an award-winning international human rights legal activist with a law degree from the University of Iowa.  Hir views stated here do not reflect those of any organization or entity.

Which is why it’s so frustrating, not to mention problematic, when I’m the only trans woman of color in radical queer space. Over and over again, I find myself in a room full of cis queer women and trans men. Over and over again, I find myself in a room full of white people. The radical queer community positions itself as representative of all queer people and advocates for the needs of the queer community. It supposedly fights against those systems of power and oppression that keep all queers oppressed. And yet at the same time, trans women of color are nowhere to be seen; even though they are the most vulnerable in our community.

One has only to glance at the case of CeCe Mcdonald to see all the worst intersections and manifestation of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. She was arrested and is being charged with second-degree murder, the same charge as George Zimmerman, for being the victim of a hate crime and fighting back. She is being charged, basically, for being a poor, black, trans woman. And while there has been a very strong movement of people organizing to free her, this is the exception to the rule.

The last 20 reported cases of trans* murders have all been trans women of color. What, than, does this say about the radical queer community when we are not centering the needs of the most vulnerable in our organizing? How can we purport to create a fully equitable world if we are not making space for them?

The reason for all this is that transmisogyny and racism is rampant and often unchecked in radical queer spaces. From TWoC lack of presence to their lack of “desirability” to their outright exclusion, it’s clear that the radical queer community is not accountable to us. They assume that since white cis queers are oppressed, they couldn’t possibly be oppressive themselves. Somehow, they think that people’s queerness excuses or erases the other ways in which they are privileged. But this is a myth that needs to be constantly challenged. The radical queer community needs to be aware in the ways that they are being oppressive, especially when it is unintentional. They need to know that there are reasons why trans women of color don’t show up to their functions or their rallies. And its because you don’t represent us.

How many black and brown trans women need to die before you put our needs first? In April alone, there have been 3 reported murders. 3 women killed in a community that is already small and nearly invisible. Coko Williams, Clay Paige, Brandy Martell. And if these are the reported murders, can you imagine the number of unreported murders? The unclaimed bodies and forgotten names?

So I challenge you, dear radical, to put your money where your mouth is. If you are really committed to this work, put us first. Be aware of our struggles, of our triumphs. Hell, be aware of our existence! Don’t just mourn us when we are murdered, but celebrate and work with us in life. Actively participate in making this world a safer place for us.

But most of all, I challenge you to see us. To know us.

 Morgan is the latest in a long line of fierce warriors. She is walking in the footsteps of Audre Lorde, Sylvia Rivera and her own mother to achieve the collective liberation of all peoples. She maintains her own blog, www.atriptothemorg.wordpress.com, and has been published in xQSí Magazine and The Urban Resistance among others. Morgan hopes to go to graduate school for writing and to use her poems, essays and stories to challenge, inspire and incite radical action. She also really enjoys Thai food.

Since my diagnosis as a teenager, I’ve tried to pay attention to how eating disorders are portrayed in the mainstream media. I don’t believe it’s changed much in the decade or so since I became interested, although I can’t back this opinion up with anything other than my own observations. Still, it seems like it’s only been within the last few years that the mainstream media has begun to really acknowledge that people other than young, white, middle- and upper-class womyn suffer from eating disorders. While the narrative is slowly shifting to recognize that men can also have eating disorders (and it grinds my fucking gears to see that these diseases are taken more seriously because of this), it is rare to see coverage of this phenomenon in people of color, gender and sexual minorities, and poor people, despite the fact that young womyn of color and poor people may be particularly vulnerable to EDs, as well as underdiagnosed and undertreated. I’ve noticed that for many people with an ED or EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified) with whom I’ve talked or whose work I’ve read, reducing the amount of space you take up in a capitalist, racist heteropatriarchy fundamentally against people like you makes getting smaller pretty appealing. Who’da thunk it.

Being trans* was a significant complicating factor in my perceptions of my body—it’s just that I wasn’t aware that people could have a gender that was not “man” or “womyn” (predicated, of course, on being “male” and “female”-bodied, respectively) until I was in my early twenties. What I understood at the time as a simple desire to be very thin was actually more about purging what I saw as the “female” parts of myself. As I see reaffirmed daily in pop culture, advertisements and in the behavior of people I encounter, femaleness is at best a weakness and at worst a sin, and I wanted the markers of it (softness and body fat, hips and breasts, etc.) off of me. I can trace being trans* back to the earliest anxieties I had about my body and how I eat, it just took me a few decades to figure it out. Indeed, that I am not a womyn was a fact I could not articulate to myself until extremely recently. I labored towards coming to terms with my confusion about my femaleness on the battleground of my actual physical body. If I couldn’t destroy those female aspects of it, I would destroy the whole thing. Unfortunately, I did a pretty good job with the latter.

I can only speak for myself when I saw that as a genderqueer/trans* person (one who is also white and tends to have passing privilege, I’ll note), being read as a womyn or female makes me feel, like, bad. Not only are femininity, female-bodied people, and womyn so completely denigrated in our culture that just living as a person identifying or read as such is a debasement (!), but I was forced to grapple with my own gender variance and my body’s “deviancy” from the gender binary by the only means to which I had access: years of restricting, compulsively exercising, cutting, taking laxatives and emetics, and inflicting other kinds self-injury on my own body to distance myself from femaleness. As if by losing weight I could force other people to recognize and respect my gender identity, as if being “merely” female could possibly be a bad thing to be.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve realized that it’s not only important to value myself, respecting my gender identity and the body in which it resides, but it’s also crucial that I support the people in my life who are womyn, femme, and/or female-bodied. Dissociating myself from the femaleness I was assigned at birth by the brutality of an eating disorder was the only way I knew how to survive when I was younger, but it doesn’t have to be like that, and I don’t have to live like that. These days, I’m focusing on taking up as much space as possible, and supporting my sisters (including my literal sisters), as they do the same.

*AFAB: assumed female at birth

Haley Davis is a writer and would-be thinker who will be attending Mills College for hir MFA in Fiction starting in the fall of 2012. Zie blogs about queerness, trans*identities, gender, feminism, mental illness and disability, reproductive “choice” and policy, intersectional oppression, and body politics at Fembot. Zie can be contacted at haleyrd [at] gmail [dot] com and prefers “she”/”her” or gender-neutral pronouns.

Jezebel’s always been a hybrid of feminism and tabloid-esque gossip. Sometimes this is effective, and sometimes it’s not. But with two recent Jezebel blog posts focused on real life people living with mental illness, the latter is clearly presented at the expense of the former. Jezebel often presents itself as the go-to website for women interested in pop culture, but uncomfortable with its many demeaning and sexist realms. But as these articles demonstrate, Jezebel really is simply part of the frustrating cacophony.

In the middle of March Jason Russell, the cofounder of Invisible Children, was placed on psychiatric hold after being found naked, disorderly, and incoherent on the streets of a residential neighborhood in San Diego. It’s pretty obvious that Russell was not in his right mind. Absolute certainty about what went down is impossible, but doctors have described his behavior as part of a brief psychotic breakdown, and he has been involuntarily committed, so mental illness is a real possibility.

Nevertheless, Jezebel blogger Katie J.M. Baker chronicled Russell’s breakdown with undisguised glee in a blog post titled “Invisible Children Cofounder Arrested for Drunkenly Masturbating in Public.” She writes, “We’re not sure how to adequately express our shock and disbelief at the news that Jason Russell, one of Invisible Children’s co-founders and the star of the Kony 2012 campaign, was taken into custody last night for drunkenly masturbating in public.” Some readers reported that an earlier version of the blog post, which was later edited, called the Russell incident “delightful.” An update to the article
included video footage. “6:30 EST: TMZ somehow got their hands on video footage. It is horrifying. No wonder the guy’s on a 5150 psychiatric hold.” Baker ended her post by seeking out more embarrassing first person accounts, “Any San Diego Jezebel readers see Jason Russell dancing around in (or out of) his underwear last night? Email us.”

Baker seems to be gawking open mouthed at someone who was very likely in the midst of a psychotic episode, saying holy shit, this happens? People go nuts? Who would have thought? Whoa. She seems to be aiming for some level of ironic humor, but instead of using humor to dismantle harmful stereotypes she merely reinforces them. Crazy people are shocking and subhuman, ya’ll.

An earlier blog post from March 10, “Dallas Flight Attendant Freaks the Fuck Out,” describes an incident where an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Chicago was delayed after a flight attendant began using the plane’s intercom to make odd announcements about the plane crashing. The flight attendant in question was forcibly taken to a hospital, and local and federal authorities said they had no plans to press charges because the incident seemed to be the result of mental illness.

However, Jezebel blogger Doug Barry chose to characterize the possibility of mental illness as hilarious, blogging that “One passenger claimed that the flight attendant even described herself as bipolar and insinuated that she hadn’t taken her medication, which is right about the moment in a thriller when the cabin door closes with a dramatic, sucking thunk, assuring the audience that they too should buckle up because they may experience some unexpected… Turbulence.”

Right, Jezebel. When someone mentions that they’re bipolar it’s like a moment in a thriller. Unless, you know, you happen to be bipolar. This piece is even worse than the Russell post, because the blogger seems more aware that mental illness played a role, but chooses to childishly mock the woman in question anyway.

Many of Jezebel’s readers were rightly outraged by Jezebel’s characterization of Russell’s breakdown and the incident involving the flight attendant. In the comments section, anne.elk wrote:

Oh, fuck you. I’d expect better from Jezebel. I have bipolar disorder and not taking your medication (and god knows it might not be easy for a flight attendant to take medication that is largely sedating and difficult to live on with unsocial hours) can make you very unwell very quickly, you ignorant ass.”

Idra wrote:

God Jezebel, y’all just can’t stop making fun of mental illness, can you? Listen, I agree, this guy comes of as a narcissistic jerk. But it appears he is having a psychotic break. It’s almost as funny as that flight attendant last week. Which is to say not at all funny.

Jezebel, consider these readers’ position and take side of the mentally ill, rather than being just another mainstream publication that stereotypes and oppresses us. Where you should you begin? Why not by acknowledging that there are actual mentally ill folks out there? Know that when you read or hear about someone behaving strangely, you might need to take the real possibility of mental illness into account. And if you should evaluate the situation, and it appears that someone’s having a nervous breakdown, realize that situation is painful for that person. Don’t blog about the incident like you’re blogging about something outrageous that Lindsay Lohan did.

Sara Adams is a journalist, photographer, and activist living in the Midwest.

Editor’s Note: As a matter of editorial policy, we have chosen not to link the articles described due to Jezebel’s history of posting photos of a victim of sexual assault, among other extreme anti-feminist acts.  If you are interested in reading the originals, they can be found by Googling the titles above.

This spectre of rape that cis lesbian “radfems” habitually raise, centered around the supposed inherent threat of the phallus, minimizes the appalling rates of physical and sexual violence committed against trans women, particularly trans women of color and sex workers.  It also twists the picture of systemic violence to make it look like trans women are a huge, systemic threat to cis lesbians when in fact trans women as a group face incredible systemic barriers in almost every aspect of life.

Certainly there are individual cases of interpersonal violence that one could bring up involving a perpetrator of any description.  But, although I may not be 100% comfortable with the mental image of panty-ripping, I find it ludicrous to suggest that trans women, in pointing out their exclusion from lesbian sexual communities and the relationship between common lack of cis lesbian desire for trans women and the structural problem of cissexism/transmisogyny, are threatening rape of cis lesbians or perpetuating rape culture.

At one point in my life, I identified as female and as a lesbian.  I was early to feminism and I had been through some difficult heterosexual experiences.  I’m ashamed to admit that I sympathized in some ways with the radfem position.  I want to be clear in my argument here–I’m not ashamed of the fact that at that time, I wasn’t interested in PIV sex or in touching a penis. That’s a legitimate sexual preference.  My shame comes from the way I looked at trans women at that time without examining my prejudices or educating myself, and the fact that I assumed a preference for cis women was a natural preference that I didn’t need to mention aside from identifying as “lesbian.”

I pinned a misogyny that at the time I attributed to almost all men onto trans women, as well.  I assumed that sex with a trans woman would be penetrative and violent, that I wouldn’t have the camaraderie with a trans woman that I felt at the time with many cis women, that female history was somehow very important.  I didn’t think about what a trans female experience might be like, or what a trans woman’s relationship to her body might be.  I was pretty naive about sex.  I put a lot of stake in body parts because I was fumbling with my own gender, body, and sexuality.  I said that I was against transphobia but knew no openly trans people.

To all the trans women I know, love, and respect now, and to any to whom I made casual transmisogynistic comments or whom I discounted then, I’m sorry.  I’m deeply sorry that I didn’t try harder, ask more questions, or deeply interrogate my own fears.

Please let me know if there’s anything you want me to do to support you now, or to be more explicitly inclusive of trans women in queer spaces.  Sometimes I forget just how often transmisogynistic cis women, genderqueers, and trans men exclude trans women from sexual communities.  Recently, I was very excited about a date with a trans woman who’d been chatting with me online, and a female trans friend asked me to tell her about “him.” She’d assumed I was dating a trans man, and I couldn’t figure out why she was so surprised that I date trans women when I knew I’d told her that several of my recent dates had been trans people.  When I started seeing the patterns, and noticing how trans women are strangely ignored in queer female sexual spaces (where I’m the one surprised at how welcome I am since I’m not female-identified) I realized that we have a hell of a lot of work to do.  If there are particular ways I can focus on this work, or on contributing to yours, I’d love to hear them.

To the radfems who focus so hard on the penis and on villifying trans lesbians, queer woman, and bisexual women, may you eventually come to feel the shame I do about that part of my life. Shame isn’t comfortable, but it’s necessary when you fuck up.

The narcissism in the radfem community is somewhat hilarious.  Why would a trans woman WANT to sleep with you?  How boring it must be to have sex with someone who reduces your body, your sexual creativity, and your capacity to a penis.  How hurtful to engage sexually with someone who denies your humanity.  No, thanks.

I’ve made my own decision never to have sex with someone who views sex with me as a favor or a concession, with someone who thinks they can describe my body without asking, with someone who assumes the paths to my pleasure.  I’m constantly rolling my eyes at straight cis men who message me on OKCupid (where I list as bisexual woman because there is no “genderqueer who prefers queer/trans men, women, both, or neither” option).  These messages typically reassure me that there is no problem with my trans identity, that my body is sexy anyway, that they’re fine with it.  Gee!  So flattered!

I’ve had good sex lately with cis women, trans women, trans men, and genderqueer/genderfluid people.  The most obvious common denominator has been the respect, desire, and curiosity with which we’ve approached each others’ bodies and sexualities.  I’m not talking about fetishistic curiosity here, but about curiosity around what makes pleasure happen in another individual. I love conducting sexual chemistry experiments, going in blind and experiencing the nerves and adrenaline as we tell each other how to name our bodies, what makes us hot, what makes us vulnerable, and how to care for one another.

It’s not always perfect, of course. CN Lester writes about the way non-binary identities can mess with binary folks’ understandings of their own sexuality. Though I haven’t often heard “no,” I have sometimes doubted the extent to which a sex partner understands my gender and relationship with my body.  There is sometimes a sense of “what you’re doing with gender is really cool, let’s talk social justice, but I love that your parts are still traditional, that you haven’t had surgery.”  I have not always been fully respected when I explained that touching a particular area gives me dysphoria, since I don’t physically mimimize it or seek medical intervention.  Occasionally my preferences, which fall outside many common sex narratives, have been criticized as boring.  It is important to me that a partner understands I can’t have gay, lesbian, or straight sex, and it’s not always evident whether this is the case.  That said, my refusal to sleep with someone who thinks they’re doing me a favor or refers to me as either binary gender with their friends has improved my sex life.

Radfems, you’re not just missing out on great sex.  You’re confused about what it means to be a lesbian, or a woman.  I don’t care what your physical preferences are or what gender identity you prefer. I do care that you confuse those two things, and thereby insult trans women.  I care that you don’t bother to interrogate the origins of your phallus-based distaste for trans women, and think about whether it’s actually a dislike of the organ that’s happening here or whether transphobia and a refusal to view trans women as women is involved.  I care that you assume describing yourself as a lesbian tells others that you prefer what you call a pussy, as if everyone has the same definition of lesbian, woman, or pussy.

THAT is privilege.  Assuming that you speak the same language, rather than consensually sharing vocabulary.  Using lesbian as a proxy term that tells a whole group of women that they are not real, and not seeing anything wrong with that.  I find your appropriation of the language of oppression disgusting.

Sit down, shut up, and read a book (or a blog). We will be over here, having fabulous queer sex without you.

To learn more about sexual preferences and building an understanding of your own complex sexual orientation beyond the one-word proxy terms like “lesbian,” join me for Workshopping Your Sexual Orientation, Sunday at 9 am at Momentum.  If you’re not in the DC area, you can workshop your orientation independently when you grab the Momemtum anthology ebook.  I don’t ask you to drop your orientation labels, but I do suggest that you expand your understanding of orientation for a fuller and more satisfying sex life.

Avory Faucette is a genderqueer radical feminist activist and writer.  Zie writes at the blog Radically Queer and works at the National Center for Transgender Equality.  Hir work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, and other identities.  Zie is particularly interested in non-binary gender and sexuality.  Zie is also an award-winning international human rights legal activist with a law degree from the University of Iowa.  Hir views stated here do not reflect those of any organization or entity.

This deep desire to be something other than what I am seems to me to have two primary causes:

1) The profound mental distress I’ve experienced and the way it’s interfered with my life.

2) The mainstream ignorance of the reality of mental illness.

Sure, the world at large knows that mental illness exists. But this superficial awareness hasn’t prevented a widespread fear and outright dislike of people living with mental illness. In a 2010 article in The L.A. Times, “Mental illness stigma lingers even though people understand it’s a brain disease,” Shari Roan reported on a study regarding attitudes toward mental illness and the mentally ill. The study looked at attitudes over time, and found little had changed from 1996 to 2006.

Roan wrote that, “For example, the percentage of people who said they are unwilling to work closely with someone with major depression was 46 percent in 1996 and 47 percent in 2006. The percentage of people who considered people with schizophrenia to be a danger to others was 54 percent in 1996 and 60 percent in 2006.”

Aware of this considerable stigma, the community of mental health advocates and organizations are focused on ending it by tackling it directly. The National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI) has a monthly “StigmaBusters Alert” that focuses on harmful portrayals of mental illness in pop culture and the media. Medical websites, such as the Mayo Clinic, often have portions of their website devoted to mental health stigma. Celebrities like Glenn Close have come forward to be spokespeople against stigma.

And while all this is admirable, and I’m sure many of that these organizations have the best of intentions, I doubt this is really enough. Ending the stigma of mental illness is important, but that alone doesn’t facilitate a real understanding of what it means to live life with mental illness.

To be mentally ill is to have a fundamentally different experience of life from those that are not mentally ill. Sanity is privileged, any break from sanity is not a choice, and the mentally ill state of mind is generally excluded from mainstream awareness. Being mentally ill in a world that barely conscious of what it means to be mentally ill is to know a fundamental part of yourself is invisible.

In order to bridge this extreme marginalization, we need more honest depictions of mental
illness. One of the most sincere descriptions of mental illness I’ve read is in David Foster
Wallace’s Infinite Jest, when one of the characters describes her mental illness shortly after being institutionalized after a suicide attempt:

This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs…It’s all over everywhere. I don’t what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine—no worse than you can imagine because there’s a feeling that you have to do something right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it is happening too…I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.

This is a work of fiction, but I don’t doubt that David Foster Wallace was drawing on his own experiences—he suffered from severe major depression and substance abuse issues, was hospitalized on more than one occasion, and ultimately committed suicide. I believe that sincere accounts of the perspective of mental illness, like Wallace’s, are critical because they make the experiences of the mentally ill visible.

I appreciate this genuine account of mental illness because it’s similar to my experience, and it’s a fact of my experience that’s had a powerful effect on my life—but it’s an experience that is hardly acknowledged, let alone discussed anywhere. This reality isn’t addressed in the media, the DSM, or by mental health organizations. It’s time for that to change, and for us to explore the many different realities and voices of mentally ill life and consciousness.

It’s time to end the erasure of mentally ill experience.

Sara Adams is a journalist, photographer, and activist living in the Midwest.

Schwyzer claims that the possible legal ramifications keep him from preventing evidence that would absolve him, or at least, clear up his side of the story.  I concede that this is possible, and that though my gut feeling is against him in this case, it may be that there are things I’m not seeing.  So this post is more about the situation than it is about Schwyzer as a person, and to write the post I am going to assume the facts as they are presented in Grace’s post on the Schwyzer controversy.  If there are additional facts, my concerns may not all apply to Schwyzer himself, but they do apply to these kinds of situations.

Part of why I didn’t pay much attention to the controversy initially is that I’m hesitant to get into discussions about whether men should be involved in feminism.  Most of the responses I was seeing were more about that question than about the problem Grace points out–the pain caused by deliberate covering up of facts, by being a public figure who claims to repent for a shady past and then going on to engage in shady, deceitful behavior.

When something like this happens, it’s not about whether men should be feminists.  It’s not even about whether men who have a past contrary to the movement should be in the movement.  And it’s not about whether this individual is a sexist or a misogynist, which is something we could go on about all day.

This is about a community’s trust.  It is about asking for forgiveness on the basis of one truth, and then admitting that the actual truth was a little bit different.  It is about the manipulation, abuse, gaslighting, deception, and coercion that so many people face in their daily lives, and the fact that these patriarchy-rooted practices bring so many of us to feminism in the first place.  When your professed truth keeps changing, you can’t expect trust.  You must acknowledge that an ever-shifting truth makes your audience question their own perception and even their self-worth.  This is especially true when your audience includes people who have often been told that their perception is less valid, that others know better, and that they must be confused or irrational.

Can someone with a terrible past be forgiven?  Perhaps.  Does someone with a terrible past have a potential role as a peer educator, trying to encourage others not to commit similar wrongs?  Sure.  Should feminism be a movement that includes people of all genders?  Absolutely.

But it is not okay to ask for a community’s forgiveness while telling a white lie out of the other side of your mouth.

Is it any wonder, for example, that indigenous people look skeptically at white people who apologize for a colonial past while at the same time profiting from continued colonialism?  Is it any wonder that African Americans distrust White Americans who make the point about their “not racism” while structural inequality is causing ongoing, active harm to Black communities?

When you ask a community for forgiveness, you must act as you speak.  You must listen and learn.  You must be aware of your own harmful practices and work on changing them.  Most of us continue to stumble as we go through our lives working to fight oppression, and of course to stumble is human.  But if you continue in an abusive, destructive, hurtful pattern, it might be time to stop asking for forgiveness and start focusing on how to right your wrongs.  It might be time to step out of the public spotlight where you make a living on your opinions about the group you have harmed, and recognize that you may never be trusted by the community.  It might be time to make peace with that and instead of asking for forgiveness, ask how you can do better.

Avory Faucette is a genderqueer radical feminist activist and writer.  Zie writes at the blog Radically Queer and works at the National Center for Transgender Equality.  Hir work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, and other identities.  Zie is particularly interested in non-binary gender and sexuality.  Zie is also an award-winning international human rights legal activist with a law degree from the University of Iowa.

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