Supergirl’s new transgender heroine makes a must hear speech

The latest episode of the superhero teen drama Supergirl is highly political. The writers are using the concept of alien refugees on Earth (Superman and Supergirl obviously being two of them) as a starting point for presenting and discussing xenophobia and the fear of “The Other”.

The aliens from other planets takes the role human refugees and “illegals” play in the current American political landscape, but the bigoted hatred shown by American racists is the same.

Now that we know that the Trump administration is planning to remove the official recognition of the real identity of transgender people – a reflection of a similar hatred of the unknown and the unfamiliar – this episode comes right on time, because this news season also presents Nia Nal, the first transgender hero in the DC universe. She is a new journalist in the newspaper Supergirl is working for.

This episode includes a nasty scene where the identity of one alien is revealed in a pizza restaurant where Nia Nal is buying her coffee. The man behind the desk becomes openly hostile when he realizes that the man ordering pizzas is from another planet, and only Nia Nal stops this from becoming very violent.

In the scene embedded below Nia Nal tries to convince her editor, James Olsen, to write an editorial condemning the increasing racist violence, and she does so by explaining the similarities between xenophobia and transphobia.

This is a clear call for action in a dark time.

Nia Nal is played by transgender actress Nicole Maines. I wrote about her two years ago in the blog post Identical twins: one boy, one girl.

Illustration by Geeks of Color.

The Anti-Transgender Bathroom Laws Echo Race Segregation

Raina Lipsitz decided to look into the similarities between the current anti-transgender “bathroom laws” being proposed in the US, and the former racist Jim Crow laws. She found a lot of similarities:

The bathroom laws targeting transgender people and African Americans have both been portraying the relevant groups as “sexual predators”.

In both cases, the supporters try to portray the victims as some kind of contamination (which was also Hitler’s tactic when portraying Jews):

Phoebe Godfrey, associate professor in residence in the sociology department at the University of Connecticut, tells me that when it comes to the anti-trans movement and the anti-segregation movement, “the parallels are direct and obvious.“ She explains: "White parents were hysterical about the integration of bathrooms from the point of view of protecting white women … The language is very similar. It’s all about uncleanliness, disease, intrusion, and a sense of personal space and privacy being violated by The Other.”

Many white people also feared that desegregation would encourage interracial marriage and thus lead to the eventual destruction of “whiteness” itself. The parallell to the TERF fear of transgender women undermining the concept of woman is clear.

During World War II there was resistance to hiring black women at production plants because they would have to share bathrooms with white women. They were considered to be diseased. The idea of having black soldiers also met fierce resistance, in the way Trump tries to ban transgender troops today.

The anti-trans propaganda insists that trans women (and to a lesser degree trans men) are mentally ill and emotionally unstable, and may “infect” others – especially kids – with their condition.

Lipsitz writes:

By now, we know that the desegregation of public bathrooms did not lead to the increased sexual victimization of — or a syphilis outbreak among — white women. Is there any credible evidence that allowing transgender people to use whichever bathroom they want will increase violence against women and children?

The answer is, of course, no.

In both cases the supporters of this kind of discrimination refer to traditions and “the way we do things” (which basically means upholding existing power structures and prejudices).

Gavin Wright, William Robertson Coe professor of American economic history at Stanford University says to Lipsitz that in the 1960s, “establishments feared that desegregation of lunch counters and restrooms would drive white customers away. But after the fact, customers got used to it in a matter of days or weeks — maybe a year or two in smaller towns and rural areas.”

Prejudice is overcome when people see that “The Other” is very much like themselves. This is what happened when gay men and lesbian women become more visible too. They were clearly not the perverted, degenerate, predators portrayed by the bigots.

And that is also how the right wing extremists and their “radical feminist” allies will be defeated.

You car read the article here.

I love this quote from from Authority (The Southern Reach Trilogy, Book 2)“ by Jeff VanderMeer.

“To square the circle” is often understood as doing the impossible. But if we want to defeat homophobia, transphobia and racism, we have to make it work. The trick is not to turn the square into a circle or the circle into a square, but for the circle to understand that the square is just another variation of the wonderful thing called life.”

There are no Normal People

As soon as people start talking about “normal”, you realize that they are not referring to the real world, but an imaginary world, the world as it should be, normally defined by a pretty narrow understanding of what their parents have told them, or their friends.

Normal is basically what your own tribe think is safe and predictable. It is a word people use to police and control others.

Transgender people have to be suppressed, because their very existence threaten the local tribe’s view of "normal”.

The fact is that there are no “normal people”, only people who believe they are normal. They are the dangerous ones.

More about the role of the “normalites” it this blog post: There are no Normal People.

Illustration: Kubkoo.

Here's What's Really Going on With That Study Saying AI Can Detect Your Sexual Orientation

Recently, scientists made headlines around the world when news broke of an artificial intelligence (AI) that had been trained to determine people’s sexual orientation from facial images more accurately than humans.

Here are some of the reasons this is bad science:

1. They only included white people from an American dating site. If their data reflect sexual orientation in any way, it is most likely because they have been tracking the fashions and gender expressions of these social groups, not genes or inborn traits.

2. The scientists have not verified the sexual orientation of those included.

3. They did not include data on bi- or polysexual persons, forcing everyone into a restrictive and stereotypical binary.

Sonia Katyal of Salon writes:

“Technology cannot identify someone’s sexual orientation,” stated Jim Halloran, GLAAD’s chief digital officer, in a statement.
“What their technology can recognize is a pattern that found a small subset of out white gay and lesbian people on dating sites who look similar. Those two findings should not be conflated.”
Halloran continued, “This research isn’t science or news, but it’s a description of beauty standards on dating sites that ignores huge segments of the LGBTQ community, including people of color, transgender people, older individuals, and other LGBTQ people who don’t want to post photos on dating sites.”

This does not necessarily mean that there is no genetic or biological basis for sexual orientation. But there is far too much diversity among both gay, bi, and straight people, as regards looks and traits, for this study to make sense.

Besides, in the hands of the wrong people this technology could cause a lot of suffering.

Katyal puts it this way.

Already, LGBT people are being rounded up for imprisonment (Chechnya), beaten by police (Jordan), targeted for being “suspected lesbians” (Indonesia), or at risk of being fired from military service (United States). What if homophobic parents could use dubious A.I. to “determine” whether their child is gay?

Note the quotation marks around “determine”. This technology can actually be used to punish straight people for being gay.

I would add that the idea that a person’s personality can be determined on the basis of facial structures was abandoned by the middle of the 20th century. It was called phrenology and led to absurd sexist and racist ideas like these:

I suggest that all natural scientist should be forced to take a course in the history of scientific bigotry before they are allowed to publish anything.

Gizelle Messina: Black Trans Women Are Here To Stay

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Gizelle Messina is a black Los Angeles-based makeup artist for M·A·C Cosmetics – an important voice for both the African-American and the transgender community.

You can meet her in the new Showtime documentary More than T.

Wear Your Voice asks: Being a visible trans woman can be hard for many. How did you find the courage to step into your own truth and live authentically?

Messina answers:

It’s something that I still battle every day. For me it was almost like boot camp being that I had to transition while managing a store in Century City. It was tough but it definitely helped me thicken my skin more than it already was just from growing up and not being able to identify [as] who I was. Having to go to work every day and claiming my authentic self and demanding that people respect me for who I was, helped [me] curate strength. Even today, when I leave my home I get anxiety. We never know what’s going to happen when we’re out there. But I would rather go out in the street and take that chance; just going out and demanding your respect. You may not agree with it but I’m walking. Being a black trans woman, it’s imbedded in us because of the type of community we are in.

More about More than T.

Here’s an interview Messina made with the Transgender Awareness project:

Transgender bathroom segregation? We have been there before.

crossdreamers:

You know all those anti-transgender bathroom bills, where their supporters will force trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender, while expressing concern for women and children? We have been there before.
What history tells us is that people who hate use segregation in public places to harass, humiliate and control those they consider inferior.
This is not about protecting women and children. This is about protecting an oppressive way of life.
Here are some pictures from the segregated American South and Apartheid South Africa. Do you see the difference between what the haters did then and what they do now?
Exactly! Trans women and trans men do not even get their own segregated restrooms. They are to stay at home, in their closets.
Anyone who supports the anti-trans bathroom bills are committing a crime against humanity, in the same way the racist of the southern states and South Africa did when these posters were put up.

Bathroom Bills & The Dialectic of Oppression

A follow up on this one. The Transadvocate has a very interesting article on the similarities between right wing extremist persecution of people of color, gay and lesbians and transgender persons.

Cristan Williams writes:

When one considers the political discourse of dominate-subordinate group integration, one cannot ignore the ways in which the bathroom is dialectically constructed as the symbol of integration.

For instance, the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activist, U.S. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo said that the most disgusting thing about life in Washington, DC was “to see nice sweet girls from North Dakota being forced to use the same stools and toilets used by the Negroes who come from the slums of Washington, a large percentage of them affected by Negro diseases.”.

In 1964, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee reported that, “Many homosexuals… take their sex where they find it, be it in a rest room of a park or other public place” and that “Homosexuality is, as a total picture, a dread disease.”

In a more contemporary time, similar rhetoric was deployed against the ratification of the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. A 1980s-era political pamphlet titled The ERA-GAY-AIDS CONNECTION asserted that the ERA would allow gay people to, “use public restrooms and parks to solicit sex with strangers”. The pamphlet went on to suggest that “If the E.R.A. puts ‘sex equality’ into the Constitution, we are asked: Would police, paramedics, dentists, health personnel and morticians be permitted to take adequate precautions to defend themselves against AIDS and other homosexual diseases?”

Almost a decade before the publication of The ERA-GAY-AIDS CONNECTION pamphlet, the public was warned that should the ERA become ratified, men would be able to use the women’s restroom and gym locker rooms and that women would lose their privacy in public accommodations.”

Such political arguments are common among those who support discrimination against transgender people. A political radio advertisement used to defeat the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) asserted that protecting transgender women in public accommodations was “filthy, disgusting and unsafe”.

Racism, homophobia and transphobia have the same roots: A fear of loss of privilege and loss of power.

Dr. Gillian Frank, interviewed by Williams, puts it this way:

Stigmatizing people by labeling them as sexually dangerous is a practice that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. In the United States, marginalized and despised groups were regularly depicted as sexual threats.
Communists, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Mexicans all were stigmatized in this way.Whites resisting Reconstruction in the southern United States deployed a powerful trope that black men were sexually predacious. They did so in order to rationalize controlling and marginalizing newly freed and enfranchised African American men. The idea that black men were rapists who desired white women undergirded lynching, which was a form of domestic terrorism used to control and disempower the African American population.
By the time we got to the Civil Rights era, the argument was this: if we get rid of Jim Crow laws and allow blacks to use the same public facilities as whites, miscegenation will take place. “Their” boys will want to marry “our” daughters. “Their” boys will want to have sex with “our” daughters. “Their” boys will want to rape “our” daughters.

More here!

(via crossdreamers)

What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech

Ulrich Baer makes some very important points regarding free speech in the New York Times. The university protests against right wing extremists speaking on campus is not an attack on free speech. They represent a defense of free speech.

Free speech rests on respect for some common rules of engagement. When one group argues that it is in some way superior to another, the other group cannot take part in the debate on equal terms.

If a fascist requires proof for the Holocaust, there is no point for a Holocaust surviver to provide such proof, as the fascist will dismiss all proof as lies. The fascist has already defined the survivor as a liar. The fascist is invalidating the very life and existence of the Holocaust victim by denying the truth and value of his or her life. That is an act of violence, not an argument in a debate.

Indeed, as Jean Paul Sartre pointed out, the fascist will knowingly break the rules, because he is not searching for the truth, he is searching for power:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.”

The concept of free speech and an open discussion requires a minimum of trust and a common understanding of what truth entails.

Bear uses transgender people as an example:

“The rights of transgender people for legal equality and protection against discrimination are a current example in a long history of such redefinitions. It is only when trans people are recognized as fully human, rather than as men and women in disguise, as Ben Carson, the current secretary of housing and urban development claims, that their rights can be fully recognized in policy decisions.
The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.”

Read the whole article here.

Transgender bathroom segregation? We have been there before.

You know all those anti-transgender bathroom bills, where their supporters will force trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender, while expressing concern for women and children? We have been there before.

What history tells us is that people who hate use segregation in public places to harass, humiliate and control those they consider inferior.

This is not about protecting women and children. This is about protecting an oppressive way of life.

Here are some pictures from the segregated American South and Apartheid South Africa. Do you see the difference between what the haters did then and what they do now?

Exactly! Trans women and trans men do not even get their own segregated restrooms. They are to stay at home, in their closets.

Anyone who supports the anti-trans bathroom bills are committing a crime against humanity, in the same way the racist of the southern states and South Africa did when these posters were put up.

Extremist all over the world, from Trump to European fascists, are trying to make the concept of “The People” equal their own supporters.

By doing so, they try to paint everyone else as the enemy of the people, servants of “The Elite”.

They do so in order to be able to dismiss all of those who do not live up to their narrow definitions of what an American, German or Turk should be, including independent women, people of color, religious minorities, homosexuals, transgender people, and men who do not have to prove their masculinity by carrying a gun.

Every time haters say that they represent the people, stand up and tell them: “We are all the People!”

All of us!

Illustration: Miss Bobbit. Design: J Molay.