Tag Archives: Journalism

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I Only Read Gawker For The Articles

The last couple of years really feels like any culture that isn’t str8wyt dudes is getting shut down. Old Gawker went from cringe and occasionally fucked decisions to the kind of proper journalism the big rags could never do. New Gawker was a tripped-out strange incoherent joy of a group tumblr. In the future, the apparent superficiality of both versions will be recognised for their deeply relevant and incisive political analysis, and for women and femmes going hard for popular culture. For now, there’s Defector, Autopian, and other post-Gawker brilliance, but it’s still sad as fuck to lose another.

Until journalism isn’t beholden to rich white dudes who throw down 1.5 million for Napoleon’s hat, or haul bathroom sinks around like it’s a meme (haha Apartheid Clyde in Dunning-Kruger National Park), whether it’s Gawker or Twitter or OnlyFans or tumblr or MySpace or Lex, the communities served by what should be public services like libraries are going to keep getting fucked over for a buck.

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Ugh Do I Have To?

Twit wants me to know that 13 years ago, on September 12th, I signed up. Happy 13 dumpster fire years.

Well hazy on the details now, but I think I signed up because China banned Blogger / Blogspot / Google, all the China bloggers mass-migrated to Twitter and it was the only way to stay up with them. A couple of years later China banned Twit too.

I logged-on last night for the first time in a couple of years for actual timeline scrolling (OKCupid had shown me enough white cishet couples and TERFs for one night). I love the people who I actively follow, as in go to their profile, read and scroll, and love the communities around them.

But but but. The place fucks majorly with my mental and emotional stability — as do all social networks. It reminds me of addiction and compulsive habits and wakes those again in me. And it’s full, full of nazis and TERFs and fascists and racists and white supremacists and swarming bot networks run by the same. And the people who own and run it are functionally indistinguishable from that, their actions leading from hate crimes to genocide.

I wish there was something else. And more than that I wish all the people I love who use social networks would understand their culpability and find ways of creating and participating in online communities not bound to necrocapitalist corporations. I can’t see that happening though.

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It’s Rasse, Not Hautfarbe

I feel like the inability of white Germans to say the Race word is probably why the rest of us don’t want to talk to them about racism.

What you on about?

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race got translated into German in 2019 as Warum ich nicht länger mit Weißen über Hautfarbe spreche. ‘Race’ mysteriously becoming ‘Hautfarbe’, skin colour. When I first saw this (like 2-ish years ago, when it was first translated), a friend said Rasse sounds very strong and would turn people off from reading it. Apparently because white Germans associate the word ‘race’ with Nazis. I strained a muscle side-eyeing at that.

I’m not aware of the full convo she had in Berlin in 2019 when asked about this, beyond her saying she was ok with the translation because she wouldn’t want to be associated with Nazis through the German word, and the audience being dissatisfied with the title. Which again, to my mind, plays into caring for white Germans feelings over the very long, multigenerational history of BIPoC Germans and specifically Afrodeutsche and Turkish-, Kurdish-, Arab-Germans who have to suck up white Germans discomfort with facing race and their own racism. And not even mentioning Jewish-Germans there ’cos we all know how white Germans’ discomfort played out there.

When I titled this, “It’s Rasse, Not Hautfarbe” I mean the title of the book. And yes, it’s also about skin colour, and a bunch of other things that combine in various shiteful ways. Just that when race becomes specifically defined as and reduced to skin colour what that in fact means is ‘skin colour which is not white, or perceived as not belonging to a white person‘.

The dead staunch Nadine Chemali said, “Tell anyone in Australia you’re an arab or wear a hijab down any suburban area and tell me we are white.” while talking about this, a conversation that’s been had in Australia for a long time now. It feels to me that this inability to say ‘race’ in Germany, in conjunction with redefining skin colour as race, pushes that whole conversation of pale-as-fuck and what it means to be ‘white-passing/appearing and not white’ far down the line. They’re digging a deep hole out of which we’re going to lose another generation of time to because white Germans refuse to learn from people who aren’t white.

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Ms. Monica Roberts

I have to get the emotional part out first. I just want to swear a lot. Around 1am last night finishing my day and heading to bed I saw Raquel Willis’ on Twitter saying Monica Roberts had died.

I’m just fucking gutted and pissed and angry and sad and hurting. And I don’t have words the way other people do who speak so eloquently of a loved one’s death.

Monica Roberts was one of the original bloggers, starting TransGriot way back in 2006, Transistahs-Transbrothas organisation in 2004, and keeping a record of and speaking for trans women and people being murdered. Even then she’d been active as a Black trans woman since the early-’90s and was a strong voice in the blogging community contributing to Pams’ House Blend, The Bilerco Project and other early sites, got on Twitter in 2009, and never stopped doing the hard work of proper trans representation and advocacy in cis space — Black trans representation and advocacy in white cis space.

I’ve been reading her that long, fourteen years at least, and she has been one of the very few constants in my online life and my trans life.

And I wanna say her love of Houston and NFL was always there and as much a part of her and important to her, and I can’t find a place for that so I’m sticking it here.

She was important to me because she was Black, because she was a Black trans woman. There were fuck all trans bloggers or writers or journalists back then, and even fewer of those visible trans people were anything other than white. It was way before 2014’s ‘Trans Tipping Point’ with Laverne Cox on the cover of Time, trans people — especially trans women, and especially Black or Brown trans women — were far from welcome in ‘LGBT’ spaces and pretty much didn’t exist in the cis world.

She was always there.

She did the work.

And like so many Black and Brown and Indigenous and migrant trans women and femmes, she faced unemployment poverty and homelessness.

Every young Black trans woman or femme who has a voice or visibility or presence in 2020 has that because she never stopped. All us older ones are here and seen because she never stopped. There is no speaking our trans history which does not recognise the monumental, tireless, ceaseless work she did.

I loved when she’d come no fucks given for some fool. Her Shut Up Fool Awards deserve a monument. I loved too when she named other trans people who brought racism and homophobia and even, yeah, transphobia along with general piss poor behaviour into the room, especially white trans women riding on their privilege. She never punched down but watching her maul someone who deserved it was as terrifying as it was hilarious.

Every photo I see of her with other trans people I see love and joy for them in her eyes. And every photo with trans women, again especially Black trans women and children, they are looking to her with love. She stepped hard for trans kids for decades and we all saw that.

She was a mother and a Mutha to so many, and an Auntie and a sister and Sistah. And now she joins our Ancestors.

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A Pile of New Books I’m Reading so far in 2020 (and late-2019)

There was a big gap this year when I had a little money for and no way of getting books. All that talk on social media of supporting artists during pandemic quarantine by buying their books hit up against furloughed supply chains.

Completely off topic here, I discovered yesterday I’d been using the entirely wrong word, furlong instead of furlough (and lifetime usage of either is in the single digits). And then I discovered furlong is 1/8th of a mile, so now I have Vin Diesel, or rather Dominic Toretto in my head going, “I live my life two furlongs at a time.”

Back to buying books. And no, e-books are not an option. I like paper, I like the feel and smell and aesthetics of books, I like how line lengths, page size, fonts, typography, layout, margins, the density of ink on paper, all that, I like how it creates a specific way of reading. So, no new books for some months and a rapidly dwindling pile of that variety which take months or years to read (Spivak, I’m looking at you.)

And then my favourite bookshop let me know books were available again and damn did I go hard. First, the Jhalak Prize announced its 2020 long and short lists and the winner, and I’m doing that thing again where I’ll end up throwing cash at about half the long list.

What is the Jhalak Prize (’cos clicking links scares me or something)? It was started in 2017 by Sunny Singh, Nikesh Shukla, and the sadly defunct Media Diversified and is an annual award for British and British resident writers of colour in any genre. And it’s consistently a banger. If I had the cash, I would without question by everything on the long list as soon as it’s announced.

And second, a bunch of weird old books I’ve been hitting my bookshop up for availability and prices for absolutely years turned up. A couple I’ve been asking about for five years. No, I cannot say no.

Some of these books have been sitting on my reading shelf since last year; some of them I finished months ago. I’m not doing that way too intense essay per book and annual Book(s) of The Year thing anymore, pumped the brakes on that. I still want to remind myself and celebrate a pile of authors who, all of whom did that indescribable magic a book can do. Some of these (’cos that’s my tendency) are hard, painful reads. Even these have beauty and joy and hope in them, and I reach for that. All these authors are my teachers and I’m grateful beyond words to have enough space in my life that I can read and appreciate and celebrate them.

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Black, Gay, Country Rapper

This combination of words will never not be beautiful and will always give me a deep sense of joy and hope. Also, Billy Ray Cyrus. Can’t nobody tell me nothin’.

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Giro Rosa 2019

Last of my favourite races until the cyclocross starts again. Giro Rosa, 10 days of riding in northern Italy, and Our Girls smashed it. Annamiek van Vleuten winning the GC, points, and mountains classifications as well as 2 stages; Amanda Spratt 3rd overall, Lucy Kennedy almost winning stage 3, and Mitchelton-SCOTT all-round the most enjoyable team to watch. Elsewhere Marianne Vos utterly shredding it with 4 stage wins and showing mad cyclocross skills, Kasia Niewiadoma almost on the podium at the end (and team with best-looking bikes), Anna van der Breggen, Elisa Longo Borghini and others just showing brilliant riding. More of this, please and thanks.

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White Cis Feminism Can’t Be Trusted

Three weeks later. Well, yes, that was a notably idyllic day, despite absence of sea, mountain, and forest. Partly it’s northern German Berlin winter smashing me once again, but it’s been a grim slog the last two months, and I haven’t had much I felt like writing about, and writing itself felt — and feels — like an effort I’m not capable of. It’s been a year of cheerless news, raking many of us who aren’t part of the ascendant ethno-nationalist lot, like daily sandpaper to the face. And in this, there’s been so many moments of — for want of a better word — progress, as if, after twenty-five years at it, I can see sometimes evidence of being heard. And then, the very ones who have a voice, who are given a platform and an audience, who fucking know better, once again push any mob who isn’t them, part of their group, under their bus.

Sometimes I feel like such an old cunt, doing this battle now into my forties, and it’s all same old, same old. Do you ever fucking listen to us? I’m using the rhetorical ‘us’ here, I slide along the interstices between many groups but feel an outsider in all. I know that it doesn’t matter what I feel, it’s how I’m seen and marked, and I know that even if I am not part of a group, I cannot fight for my life without fighting for theirs. In all this, there’s one group which can be relied on to not do the same.

White, cisgender women can’t be trusted. Their feminism also. Whether hetero or lesbian or queer, the history in my life of white cisgender women who call themselves feminist is they will fuck the rest of us over, whoever we are. They don’t see us as equal or deserving or really even human. I’m tired of them opening their mouths and some transphobic, racist, Islamophobic, anti-sex worker, anti-BDSM, colonialist, ableist, or any and all of the other –ist shit coming out. I’m tired of them not getting it, not learning, not listening, not educating themselves. I’m tired of the unnecessary shit they bring down on everyone not them.

We have obligations, wherever we are located in the hierarchy of shit, to those who have it harder than we do. We need to understand where we are located in this hierarchy, individually and as members of multiple groups, and how this location has shifted over history and place; that the primary agenda of any of the groups is only a sub-set of the larger, hundreds of years old struggle for emancipation and restitution for us all. You don’t ever advance your own agenda by shitting on those below.

I mainly wrote this after yet another white, cishet woman shat on trans women. Again. The same bullshit from the feminism of my teens continuing unabated twenty-five years on. The word feminism is so hot right now, but youse all have to understand it hasn’t been great for a lot of us, who aren’t the right kind of woman, or don’t live the right kind of life. It’s actively tried to erase us, legislated against us, denied us our rights and selfhood, incited hatred and violence. That’s your feminism. Go and learn your history, then come back and clean up your mess.

I was thinking of political parties last night, and the term, ‘to stay on message’. I wonder if it’s so difficult for white feminists to stay on message because they think they’re exceptional and the message doesn’t apply to them. So here’s the message:

Every time you talk about feminism, you say:

  • Trans women are women, and suffer discrimination at a higher rate than cis women. The issues facing trans women are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Non-binary and gender non-conforming people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than heteronormative-presenting cis women. Their issues are our issues, and are feminist issues.
  • First Nations and Indigenous women and non-binary people face greater discrimination and barriers than white women, and face specific generational trauma. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Black, brown, POC, and BAME women and non-binary people face greater discrimination and barriers than white women. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Muslim women and non-binary people face specific discrimination and barriers that non-Muslim women do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Women and and non-binary people with immigrant histories face specific discrimination and barriers that women without this history do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Women and non-binary people with disabilities face specific discrimination and barriers that women without disabilities do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Women and non-binary people who do sex work face specific discrimination and barriers that women who do not work in this field do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Women and non-binary people who are in prison face specific issues and hardships, more so for trans women and men. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Working class, poor, un- and underemployed women and non-binary people face specific issues and hardships, that educated, middle-class women do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Queer women and non-binary people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than heterosexual, cisgender-presenting women. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Intersex women and non-binary people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than non-intersex women, and are often subject to non-consensual surgeries. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Reproductive health is not just for cisgender women. Some men have uteruses, or menstruate, or are capable of pregnancy; some women have penises; some have both or neither. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.
  • Many women and non-binary people belong to multiple combinations of the above, they face specific and amplified overlapping discrimination, barriers, and ostracism. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues. This is intersectional feminism.

This is not an exhaustive list. The language will date rapidly, indeed it already is clunky. That’s both on language and on me. My ability to even formulate such a list is due to the many women and non-binary people whom I have learnt from, FNI, Black, Muslim, immigrant, queer, trans women and non-binary people. There are faces I see with each of those sentences.

The history of feminism is intrinsically tied to the history of colonialism, white supremacy, and oppression. It is as much prone to essentialist nationalism of the body as racist nationalism is, with all the imperatives towards taxonomising, segregating, and labelling bodies as acceptable or not, human or not. If you want to use this word, you must reckon with its history, with what has been done, to whom, in its name. The above list is the bare minimum, even less. That’s the work that has to be done if feminism wants to claim for itself the bodies of women — and even then, there will be many of us who want no part in your feminism. You have to live with that, and do the work to make amends.

It is work. It is hard, ceaseless, decades and generations long work. It’s work you have to do, and it’s work you can do. When I think of where my interests and attention lay a decade ago, I cringe at how shallow my grasp of this was, in no small part because my grasp of myself and my own history was also shallow. I fuck up, make mistakes, apologise, try to do better, learn from my betters — who have far more pressing concerns on their time than me using it — try pass on that learning and rep them whenever I can, sit down and shut up when it’s not my place, speak up when it’s required, remind myself that people can change and it’s my obligation to encourage this. There’s no embossed certificate at the end of this, no letters before or after your name for all the work you have to do, on yourself first and those around you once you start to get it, you won’t be finished in three or six years, or sixty. But that’s the work, it’s the bare fucking minimum.

Lately I think it’s not for lack of knowing all this stuff that is causing white cis women to dependably shit on the rest of us. I think they do know all this, they’ve heard it their whole lives but they’ve decided they don’t care. It’s not that they don’t know about the issues facing trans women, they are quite sure we’re not women. They do think brown and black immigrants — especially Muslims — are terrorists or genetically misogynist. They truly believe that because it wasn’t them doing the invading and colonising, it’s not their fault, and damned if they’ll take any responsibility. And on and on down the list, making an exception for each one, not my problem, fuck you mate, I’m alright.

I’m saying this as someone who grew up in a white world and was told that was what I also was. Extricating myself from that, knowing my history, is lifelong work. And that’s also what we fight against: the breaking of history and community, atomising each of us, leaving us in one generation without the means to speak to our grandparents, or even knowing who they were. This erasing of history is the greatest ongoing work of colonialism and white supremacy. If feminism wants to stand against anything, wants to contribute anything of worth, it must stand against that, 500 years of that. And in that, white cis feminists must understand that the answers and ways out of this aren’t going to come from them.

And if you can’t do that, take your feminism and fuck off.