straight-up pinay forever

Actually, while we're on the subject of ambiguities, I'd like to give a shout-out to the Pin@ys out there in the audience.

Despite the bumper sticker on my truck, I am not a straight-up Pinay, any more than I am a straight-up anything. My father's family have been in the U.S. for a few decades longer than my mother's, and they come from Central and Eastern Europe. There be redheads, there, truth be told.
And my mother's family? As she's constantly reminding me, they're not straight-up anything, either. We can call them "Filipino" or whatever we like--dig a little deeper and we're a lot Spanish, some Fujian Chinese, some Malaysian, some Pacific Islander of the flavor that generally has "-nesian" attached at the end, along with whatever portion is actually indigenous. My relatives on that side of the family vary widely, with names in Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese; broad Malay noses and long Andalusian ones, nut-brown skin and pale olive. There's racism from the whiter ones toward the more Asian-Pacific-Islander ones. There's issues with who's from the northern islands, and who's from further south.

To be Pinay or Pinoy is to be mestiz@. Period. It's a country that's been colonized over and over, with mixing every time. My ancestors were multiracial long before I was.
And it's one of those things I've been thinking about, with all this organizing around antiracism and so on: where does a Pinay fit? In North America, our status in terms of "race" gets very strange. Depending on what city you live in, what's the makeup of your local Filipino community, it seems like nobody's sure who claims us or which box we're supposed to check.

Lots of us--most of us, even--are Spanish-speaking, or at least partially descended from Spanish speakers. We come out brownish. My cousins in one branch of the family are generally read as Latin@s, and that's fine with them; that's where their community is. Spanish-speaking brown mestiz@s with ancestors who were colonizers from Iberia. So do we--with all that in common--count as Latin@? Not really, not quite. For one, the "indigenous" in the mix is Asian/Pacific-Islander. So is that what we count as? Well, sort of--except for the language barriers, and the fact that for many of my relatives, countries like China and Japan sent colonizers and occupiers, too. Where's the sense of pan-Asian identity for those of my family who lived under the Japanese occupation during World War II? You'd be hard-pressed to find it. I identify as Asian-American, in part, but people often blink when I tell them so. They read me as Latina, or as Arab, or maybe as Andalusiana.

Filipin@s are everywhere in the world, from Honolulu to Los Angeles to Dubai to Jerusalem, largely doing crap jobs for other people. In the US, the Philippine Scouts don't even get veterans' benefits. It seems like in these big sweeps of identity-based organizing, Pinoys and Pinays get left out to dry--we don't really fit in with our Latin American cousins, and we don't seem to fit in with our mainland Asian cousins, either. Those of our greater family who left for the south and east across the Pacific left us behind, even if we caught up with them to do yard work on Kaua'i. What organizing do we do and around what rallying points? Maybe I'm just cut off from my community, in that way, and I missed the bus. I know I can work under the greater, umbrella People of Color banner, but when it gets down to nuts and bolts, I'm usually the only Filipina in the room.

There's missing pieces, here. I think there's also a lot of interesting conversations to be had--some ongoing, some years old, some yet to come.
Straight up.

inter/sectionality and false exclusivities

Apparently I am a middle-aged white guy.
It's a funny contrast with the ridiculous bumper-sticker on my beat-up truck: "STRAIGHT UP PINAY FOREVER," tattoo-style. That, and my epic nose.

Now, this is interesting, but it's come up a bunch of times that people are struck this way, and I think it's worth looking at. "Whoa," said people when I met them face-to-face at a blogger meet-up. "I really expected you to look different." How different? Well, for one, they figured I was in my forties. For another, they figured on my being bigger, paler, and more interested in men. We're not even going to get into people's assumptions about my relative attractiveness.
It's not the first time. During the whole mess over my "The Seam of Skin and Scales" piece, it came up: people figured on my being a middle-aged, rich, post-operative, Caucasian, mainstream male-to-female transsexual. Who, I might add, looks like a man in a dress.
It came up again the other day, with a progressive collaborator having thought I was a white man.
People keep expressing surprise: that I'm twenty-four years old, that I'm brown, that I'm partnered with a woman. That I'm only first-and-a-half-generation American on one side. That I'm not culturally urban.

In all of these situations, for the most part, when I can get an explanation out of people, it comes down to one factor: I blog about being transgendered. In each of these instances, people have admitted: their stereotype of a trans woman is a manly-lookin', man-loving, upper-class white American of middle years. Even though I allude pretty regularly to my racial background, my age demographic, and my orientation, they fade out as soon as the "trans" part comes up. I think this is fascinating, especially since there's only one time this fact of my life fades out: when people only know me from my blogging about race issues.
Then they forget I'm queer.

Let's flip it: in this recent Bloglandia dust-up, the emphasis in my comments and contributions has been on my being a young woman of color. And as soon as that happens--that that's people's entree into who I am--the assumptions shift. People new to dealing with me miss that I'm transgendered, and the womanhood part tends to go unquestioned, but the fact that I'm primarily oriented toward other women fades out. That and people assume, well, young woman identifying as of-color, using the word "multiracial," one of those races is probably "black."
The picture shifts. You hand people the one label--young WOC writer--the picture is a cisgendered black woman, from what I've seen. Maybe, if folks are paying attention, it shifts to "Latina."

People can go to my blog's front page and read the header; they can read any of the posts of mine that have gotten wider exposure. The information is all there, and comes up a lot. But it seems like only part of it can show up at a time, with both allies and antagonists: that I'm a trans woman or a woman of color. I can emphasize that I'm mixed-race, mestiza, Pinay; the options people fill in, if they're not really paying attention, are "black" and "white." There have to be neat boxes.

I started this blog out trying to emphasize writing about street medicine, progressive activism, postcolonial feminism, current events, and the religious left. That was the plan. But what got the attention and the exposure were my posts about trans and queer issues, and as soon as that happened--that the label "trans" was firmly attached to me online--my race vanished. If I was talking about stuff from my own heritage, it was assumed to be cultural appropriation. I wasn't listed as a POC blog. All that was interesting was the trans stuff. I admit--I turned down a very kind and generous invitation for hosting on a trans-specific site, and this was a lot of it: that I didn't want to never write about anything but trans stuff again. I didn't want to get stuck in that box and be another "trans blogger." But the more work I did in that vein, the more attention I got, and the more all my other topics--religion, street activism, postcolonial issues--faded into the background. The more publically transgendered I got, the whiter I got.

I've been watching the blogrolls I appear on. A lot of them are split up into categories, and if there's a trans-issues category, I'm in it--not in the "feminism" section, not in the "POC/WOC issues" section, not in the "religion" or "politics" sections. Maybe I make it into "multi-issue" or "queer." And that's been interesting to watch, now that I'm more involved in the radical WOC section of the blogosphere--the renegotiations. How am I primarily identified? If "trans" comes into it, it ends up coming first, over and over.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that some of us are still letting sink in the notion that queerness, or trans-ness, are a "white man's disease." Maybe we're just internalizing the stereotypes about these things being sole products of late-twentieth-century North America. Maybe it's just the saturation of media images of one type only--the Transamerica, Jenny Boylan, Christine Jorgensen, confessional-memoir narrative. Either way, I don't even get to claim complexity in my own gender presentation, let alone in every other aspect of my life.

I feel like I have to pick and choose. And as someone who's also multiracial, with an upper-class parent and a working-class parent, raised in three different religious traditions, ambidextrous--it just seems par for the course. It also seems frustrating and ridiculous. what do I emphasize? What does that say about what matters most to me? How do I organize the priorities, in both daily life and activism? By what affects me most, on a daily basis? Is that gender? Is that gender history? Is it the color of my skin? Is it my cultural upbringing? My class background? Do I try to be an anti-racist who also happens to be a queer feminist, or a feminist who also happens to be an Asian-American trans person, or a religious-left activist with family background in Judaism, Catholicism, and ancestor veneration, who is heavily influenced by Third-Worldist and postcolonial ideas? What's it going to be, on any given day?

How is it that even in ostensibly progressive circles, we still find all of these things mutually exclusive, like you can only be one kind of minority at once?

This is a liminal life I live--always between and around, rarely in or through. I tend to expect, though, that when all the information people have on me is what I present to them, that what I present to them will be--absorbed? noticed? When the only information I give about my racial background is my Pinay mother and Ashkenazic father, when I'm up-front about my age, or orientation, or class background, or gender status--I suppose I tend to assume that other people will have as little trouble letting all of these things be simultaneously true as I do.

And they don't. Somehow I manage to be a lot of people I'm not, really. Maybe it's another part of the monstruousness--invisibility.

For those of you out there dealing with and negotiating similar intersections, I'd love to hear your perspectives on this whole tangle. How do you work it out? What do you prioritize? Why? Where do we go, if we want to go toward integrating all this?

I was only speechless for a moment.

So, in the face of this whole mess regarding Jessica Valenti's book--I'm not going to bother linking to the lot of it, it's sort of hard to miss and I've mostly said my piece--I come across this comment, from "Layla," in Jill's apologetic post on Feministe:

Jill, you apologize for yourself and your views way too much. You most certainly did not ‘fuck up’ — and I’m saying this as a past critic of Jessica and as a ‘woman of color.’ Which is a stupid term — my color is only skin deep and I don’t define myself by it.
Jessica is anything but a ‘marginalizer’ — and as a feminist, let me tell you, white women are no more privileged than any others. As far as our biology, our sex, goes, we are all equally oppressed or liberated. If ‘women of color’ are more oppressed, it’s more because of class and culture reasons than by reason of their sex. Feminism is the great equalizer, and frankly, these self-absorbed women of color (and admittedly, I am self-absorbed too, but at least I don’t expect everyone else to be absorbed in my issues as well) need to get a fucking grip and lay off Jessica. One would think Jessica had just single-handedly managed to fuck things up for ‘women of color.’

I cannot let this go. First, Layla, you invalidate the self-identification of women of color, going so far as to put scare quotes around the term every time it comes up. You're--let me get this straight--a 'woman of color' denying other women's prerogative to identify with or organize around their race, or even to call themselves by such a name--it's "stupid," among other things, because "color is only skin deep."

That's cute. You continue by suggesting that there is no differential of privilege between white women and women of color--we're all Equally Oppressed As Women, which you present as the "as a feminist" position--and any differences can be explained away by class (saying something about yourself, here?) or "culture" (it's the brown men hurting their brown women more? Pray tell.). Saying otherwise is "self-absorbed" whining. Advocating otherwise is expecting everyone else to get "absorbed" in your (pet) (self-absorbed) issues. "Get a fucking grip."

Layla, I don't care what color you are: that's some racist bullshit. Really? Are you seriously saying that the world's systemic treatment of white women and women of color is the same, only affected by economic class? Because last I checked, that's pretty much saying that the world's systemic treatment of white people and people of color is the same, that we're all "equally oppressed or liberated." Maybe you're being sloppy; that's my most charitable guess. The only other explanation is that you're claiming there's no such thing as racism.

Let's let that sink in for a second.

Wait, I'm sorry. Color is only skin deep, right? We can all choose to just be unaffected by it, if we don't identify ourselves by the color of our skin. I mean, it's just that we're buying into this system that it affects us--or, wait, doesn't, since there's no differential of privilege in this world based on skin color. Sorry, got stupid and self-absorbed there for a second.

The rest of us live in a world where we have to deal with the consequences of other people's assumptions about us, treatment of us, and oppression of us based on their perceptions of the color of our skin and the homes of our ancestors, whether we like it or not. We have to live with and work against systems--political, social, economic--biased on those grounds. Sometimes we choose to pay attention to those things, note why they happen, and try and get together to talk about them or make them stop happening. Pretending they don't is a one-way ticket to getting our asses kicked. So yeah--we're "people of color." We're "women of color." A lot of us whiny babies identify that way, in no small part, because it helps us find each other and work together. It's called an "anti-racist movement."
As it so happens, a lot of "as a feminist" types have noticed this, too. They pay attention to things like history, or colonialism, or racism, or anything in front of their noses. And they manage to be good feminists, somehow, even though they acknowledge that there are multiple axes of oppression and they intersect now and then.

Then again, you did just claim that racism doesn't exist. And I can only imagine that--seeing as I've heard the assertions you made come out of white people who don't know better many times, but never, ever out of a person of color--that either you're not really who you say you are, that you pass enough as white never to deal with these things, that you are missing at least four of your senses, or that you are benefitting from such overwhelming privilege along other axes, like the economic one, that you have the luxury of ignoring what the rest of us deal with. I'm not sure which set of conditions is the most flattering for you, but I certainly don't like to call people liars about their self-identified racial background, so that sort of narrows things down.

In this conversation? After this blowup? I can only equate it to the women I know who say, hey, those feminists sure are whiners, because I can't think of any time I had any problems to deal with based on being a woman as opposed to a man. After all, I can get my boyfriend to do just about anything for me, and women have a certain kind of power, too, and I live pretty comfortably, and, and...anyway, I don't know what they're always complaining about. "Sexism" is pretty stupid. Way to be self-absorbed.

How about, instead of telling the rest of us what the world is like for us, sister, you step off. And on your way out? Check your motherfucking privilege.

shoulder to the wheel

Okay, so I'm a deadbeat blogger. We know this. I've had all of two days off in the past month, most of my days on are ten- and twelve-hour shifts, I'm sleeping whenever I can, and I'm pretty wrecked.
Honestly, I've been reading, when I can, but I barely have the time to comment, let alone post. (Let's say nothing of my ability to do stuff like, oh, see the doctor and dentist.)

Well, blogging, especially political and feminist blogging, has got to be about community. I've refrained from doing as much linking as I ought to because I assume you-all are all reading the good stuff anyway.
I decided that's silly. I talk about how we ought to have more important concerns than irrelevant starlets and whether or not they wear whatever, that we ought to pay more attention to our allies? Well, fine. Money, meet mouth. No more kicking around with fifty jillion open tabs waiting to write something brilliant about what other people are brilliantly writing.

Here:
Listen to Nezua, telling you about the rights you've got when the boots hit the pavement. It's one I know some about myself, having discovered that when they're bigger and more armed than you, you have what rights they decide to give you.
Listen to Sylvia, who is wondering why the giant neon sign that says TERRORISM HERE seems completely meaningless to greater media when the weapon-stockpiling terrorists are white people and the targets are brown folks.
Listen to Brownfemipower, when she points out abuse of a media member. I've had my body saved from breaking by cameras. When they stop being scared of doing wrong in front of cameras because they can make the cameras disappear or because they stop caring or don't think anyone will hear it, you know you've got real problems. She's giving you stuff to watch. If you haven't, do. Actually, just listen to BFP as often as possible, because she's telling you stuff you need to hear. Pay attention. Please.
I mean, seriously, as petitpoussin points out, what is it? How are we allowing ourselves to go in circles about--actually, no. How are we panicking about outfits and tossing out people who could be allies instead of finding ways to welcome them in and--actually, look.
Let's just go with what Blackamazon had to say about it. For all the talk about solidarity and Class Whichever and We're All In This Together and how my demographic's concerns become those of more privileged folks when they need the ammo or the photo-op, but take a backseat to interminable debates about irrelevant media personalities as soon as there's a challenge, look. There's folks who will have your back, and those who won't. And we've got to look after each other. We've got to keep our eyes on who is actually working in solidarity, and who's paying lip service. We've got to build community with the folks who actually have given some evidence that they care.

Some folks don't have to think about these things. Here, Magniloquence points out that some of us have very, very different concepts of what "police" means. Here, Spotted Elephant grabs us by our collars and wants to know where the hell we are when it comes to time stand in solidarity with the disabled and mentally ill. For crying out loud, can we just stop dehumanizing each other while we're trying to "fix" people's problems?

Solidarity says "not my problem" is nonsense. We're all in this together. If you're not brown, you're not disabled, you're not poor, your legal status is all in one place, if--actually, see, no. There shouldn't have to be a list.
It should all get summed up when we tell each other, as allies, check your privilege.
Sit back. Listen to folks. Learn something. And then get your hands dirty.

slings and arrows

So last night I'm having dinner with my folks--my father's birthday, and my younger brother just clear of a year of college--and we're reading the news in a slow spot afterwards.
"Oh," says my mother, with venom. "I'm so glad Paris Hilton is going to jail."
"Yeah," echoes my brother, generally a sweet kid, but hanging out lately with a few too many macho-men. "She's such a whore."

It gave me pause, but of course I jumped in: "Is your problem that she was driving drunk, or that she has sex?" Spluttering from both about her obnoxiousness. "Yes, but is it good she's doing time because she's a rich, entitled person who thinks she can do whatever she wants, or because she doesn't wear much clothing?" My mother notes, quietly, that we could be using 'the dreaded c-word.' At that point, I really had to hold myself back, while my brother insisted that, no, he has no problem with people having sex, I mean, no problem with women, you know, it's just that--

So I look him right in the eye. "Then say what you mean. If your problem with her is that she has a sense of entitlement, criticize that. If your problem is that she's committed a crime, criticize that. The sex she has and the way she dresses have nothing to do with it. Precision of language. You get yourself into trouble otherwise."

At this point there's more spluttering about 'just kidding' and an evasion joke about, ha-ha, what's the world coming to when a guy can't down a beer and call some woman a bitch, and, god, hearing about this and that all the time, so I finally remind him, "Look, is she the problem, or the media machine that pays attention?"


I am not a fan of Ms. Hilton, myself. I think she represents a great deal of what is wrong with our society. But she herself is not only not the problem, she is beside the point.

Precision of language.
How many times a day do I hear unpleasant things or undesired qualities called 'lame,' for instance? Is your problem that your taste in music can't walk, and is similar to a person who can't? Frankly, I've heard that one thrown around, even in feminist circles, over and over, and had to work to purge it from my own daily vocabulary. But it's not saying what you mean. Criticisms and arguments work better when they're well-aimed; language like 'lame' is a scattershot, hitting nearby scenery you'd best leave alone. It weakens your point and does harm--even low-level harm, harm you'd like to ignore--to people to whom you should be an ally. Yeah, the hipster cred for your thumbs-down and 'laaaaame' plays well to the audience, but it won't hold.

An entitled rich white woman who drives drunk with a suspended license--there's a lot to aim at, there, accurate things, valid criticisms. Shooting at her sex life is not only irrelevant, it's insulting to the intelligence of you and your audience. You can do better. You can find ways to get your point across--even a vicious, hardcore point--without, say, using "whore" and embarrassing yourself while reinforcing a nasty cultural notion of women's sexuality at the same time. Trust yourself to come up with something scathingly accurate. Trust the people listening to get it.

It goes on and on. When someone does something vile, you serve nobody by dismissing them as a nutjob. Calling them crazy not only absolves them of responsibility for their actions, it lets every mentally-ill person in earshot that somewhere in your head they're equivalently dangerously unstable. You may not mean it at the time, but that's the point. You get sloppy with your language, you reinforce plenty of ideas you (hopefully) would rather not, you devalue innocent people, and, meanwhile, you let your target off the hook. You didn't mean it? Well, good. Say what you mean, then.

I just get so tired of this nonsense. I get tired of giving Michelle Malkin ammunition to pretend that liberalism is racist by pointing out the people who criticize her racist, fascist, eliminationist ideas by making cracks about her sex and her heritage--and not just because I'm a Filipina who really can take about a minute of the 'ruv you rong time' before I start making fists. Don't hate 'Usama bin Laden for being Arab, hate him because he kills lots of people and thinks that's an okay solution to the world's problems. Don't nail George Bush for being an alcoholic, nail him for implementing disastrously shortsighted, imperialist, profit-first policies abroad and ignorant, theocratic, authoritarian ones at home.

You can do better. You can do much better. It's not about tiptoeing around and being "PC." It's not even about avoiding offending people, which is quite the bugbear anyway--then folk get to dance around pretending that this is all about oversensitive folks with hurt feelings, instead of real concerns and critiques. It's about aim, among many other things. Get people on their actual crimes. When you waste your words on nonsense like "whore" and "lame" and "bitch" and "psycho," you fail to aim your criticism at the actual problems, all while doing harm to bystanders. You let the offenders off the hook and elbow your neighbor in the face while you're doing it. You know better than that.