schoolyard on fire

I just don't know what to say, but, crying over it tonight, I decided it was sinful not to say something.
That's part of the trouble--I always bought into just enough of the propaganda that I could shake my head and say, well, it's just so sad. It's just a shame. If only the cycle of violence could stop. If only they'd put down those weapons. Hey, you kids, you two, knock it off.
The stories I listened to only worked if I put away the numbers, put away the proportions. And now, I just...what do you say? What do you say to this?

Nothing is not an option, when it comes to the carnage and massacre in Gaza right now.

I just want to say, to all the people demonizing Palestinians right now, saying that this was all a sinister plan to get a bunch of their children killed to make Israel look bad, that this would all just stop if they'd put down the rocks and handmade mortars and listen to reason, they're all terrorists anyhow, they'll push every Jew into the sea--how? How? What is all this "self-defense" defending against?

How could they manage? Gazans live in an open-air prison. They are literally walled-in to one of the most densely populated places in the world. Walled in. No food coming in, no medicine, no fuel, unless they break an unjust law. No leaving, not without humiliation, harassment, assault, and death. There is nobody in there who hasn't lost someone. How many of those women have not been raped? How many of those children have parents? How many Gazans had a meal this week?
They are mostly fighting with old rifles, handmade short-range explosives, rocks and slings, against one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Don't put that fact aside. Are people in Gaza committing acts of violence that have killed innocent people? Yes. They're hurling a handful of rickety rockets over the wall. In response, they're up against fighter jets, tanks, a navy, and a well-outfitted corps of the best-trained soldiers in the world, well-fed and sharp and with access to nuclear weapons. And this military they're fighting already has them walled in and starving, their neighborhoods smoking rubble, too many of them missing limbs. Tell me this is just an eye for an eye, what a shame. It's not an eye for an eye. It's a fingernail for a torso, at best. Tell me which Gazans have fighter jets. Tell me who in Hamas, even, has a nuclear-capable military unit that could wipe out their enemy at the press of a button. Show me one Palestinian tank.

Knock it off, you kids. Just put down the weapons, no, I don't care who started it. Ahmad, put down your slingshot. Avi, put down your F-15. You're both equally responsible here.

What the hell is this? How are we saying these things? An eye for an eye? In the last eight years, 15 Israelis killed by Hamas in Gaza--real people who mattered. In the last eight years, five thousand Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. Real people who mattered. This is not an eye for an eye. This is nothing resembling an eye for an eye.

But, you keep saying, those Gazans are harboring Hamas, hiding terrorists among them! Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a million people who are not allowed to leave and have nowhere to run. And they deserve death if their apartment--if they still have one--is within shrapnel range of some guy who works for Hamas or his office or the school he went to? If their neighborhood mosque has a couple members who own a gun? If they have the audacity to be on the street trying to feed their families? They're not harboring anyone. They're pressed up against them in prison.

But, but, they voted for Hamas. Tell me what you would do! Tell me! Who do you believe, who do you listen to, who do you rely on? You are walled into a prison with guns pointed at you all the time. Food is not allowed in, fuel is not allowed in, medical supplies are not allowed in. You lose count of family members violently dead or maimed. Your schools and hospitals and places of worship are destroyed, your neighborhood is full of rubble with few buildings intact, and you cannot expect to live to thirty. And you don't know any of the people on the other side of that wall.
Who do you listen to as a reliable source? The guys with the guns pointed at you, who took the food away and tell you you deserve to have nothing, but who the outside world tells you are decent folks acting justly? Or the people you're told are evil scumbags, but who provide you food, medicine, a little pride, a little order, and the promise to fight for you? Who among you, looking at your hungry, sick child, is going to listen to the person telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to care for them over the person handing you bread and antibiotics and a little civil infrastructure? Do you listen to the asshole who gives you food, or the asshole who takes it away? When you have nothing, no dignity, no hope, when you've got nothing to lose, who do you listen to? What do you think you would do differently? Do you honestly think that, with a gun pointed at your family, you wouldn't be grateful for even a vile human being who tells you you don't deserve it and points a weapon right back?
I don't think I'm that saint. I don't think you're that saint. You want to say you'd know better?

How? Who's in charge? Because in the last three days, in the name of exterminating Hamas, Israeli military bombardments have destroyed the university and the tunnels for getting food and medicine and fuel, have destroyed mosques, and have obliterated the police station. After all, if the people voted for Hamas, then any infrastructure that allows them any order or human dignity is technically a Hamas target, right? Those civilians, by having universities, police stations, and post offices, are harboring terrorists. Those people trying to smuggle in heating oil and grain are terrorists. Hell, who doesn't count as a military target? Especially when your own society conscripts every citizen into the military, and the only civilians are the ones not serving right now?

What do you expect? What do you expect them to do? You take away education, government, hospitals, civil police, anyone who can provide information or order but the gang you're supposedly trying to weaken. You take away food and water and electricity and bandages and set their homes on fire, because setting a crowd on fire to get one criminal or ten is something any reasonable person would do. You wall people in, deny them any basic order beyond your tanks, cut them off and take away any hope of a future, any way to invest themselves in building something different, the basic elements of survival--and you expect them to greet you as the reasonable person here? You expect them not to fight back, ever? You make them live like animals, and you expect them to sit down and talk about it over tea? This is not just a surgical strike on Hamas government and military installations, not packed in like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population for voting in a way that, frankly, was hardly optional. It's teaching them a lesson, with explosions. What do you expect those people to do?

Wouldn't you fight back? If it was you? Your family? Your surgically-struck future? Your bombed-out hopes? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you look at the deaths of 5000 against the deaths of 15 and justify some things that, on a good day in a decent place where life made sense, you would never consider? Because in the last three days they just lost four hundred more, and these were not just military targets. Without medical aid, most of those 1500-so-far wounded will die, too. What would you do? How can you just say, well, it's so sad, but if only they'd stop with those rockets. If only they'd stop fighting back and respect this situation. Everyone's lost someone over there, Israeli and Palestinian alike, but how superhuman do you expect these human beings to be? How can you pretend that nobody has a breaking point, and nobody makes ugly choices when they have nothing, and the person who enforces their having nothing is right in front of them? It's not polite. It's not pretty. And if it was my family, you are goddamn right that little old violence-hating people-loving me would have a gun in her hands, too, or at least a goddamn slingshot.

How superhuman do you expect them to be? is one question. The other is, to believe these things about these people--that this bombardment was all part of a sinister Hamas plot to sacrifice lives to make Israel look bad, that Palestinians are turning out the lights and inducing their children to cry on camera and faking injuries to pretend to the outside world that they're suffering--how subhuman do you believe these people are? How far do you have to go to believe that these people are so alien to you, all sociopathic monsters, to believe these things? That they asked for it?

Why? Because they voted for bad guys? Do Americans deserve to be walled into open-air prisons and have everything taken away, ground into the rubble and broken glass and starving because too many of us voted for George W. Bush and we put genocidal jackass Andrew Jackson on our money? French people? Plenty of them voted for Le Pen, and he's a brownshirt-wearing fascist. Italians? Berlusconi and his Roma purges were hardly a bright spot. What makes you different?
Now take away the options and stop making Palestinians so alien. What would you do? If it were Atlanta walled in and crushed like this? San Francisco? Cincinnati? Manhattan? Would you care that the people bombing your police stations and highrises and shopping centers were doing it because your elected leader killed some people? When do you draw the line? When they blow up the fire department? The tunnel where you sneak in food? Would you decide that you shouldn't fight back, with the tanks at your doorstep and the bombers overhead?

Hey, you two, knock it off. You kids knock it off. It's just so sad, it's just a shame. Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber. An eye for an eye, is what it is. It's just self-defense.

This is being done in my name, by a state that says that anyone who questions its actions is an anti-Semite--that anyone who finds their state actions unacceptable is threatening me. It's funded with the taxes I pay to my own government, on the other side of the world. This is being done to the families of people I love. When it was my ancestors, fighting back and sometimes doing awful things in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Masada, it wasn't "terrorism," it was self-preservation. I just celebrated a holiday commemorating an outnumbered, outgunned guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly-better-armed occupier who said, hey, look, don't mind our elephants, just put your slingshot down and we'll stop setting everything on fire. We don't call Judah Maccabee a terrorist, either, but what's the difference? Tell me the difference. Because this is genocide. This is genocide in my name, in the name of a people who have always considered ourselves underdogs and who, in this one place and time, suddenly have the overwhelmingly upper hand. How have we not learned better? How does our history of suffering and extermination justify committing these crimes? How are we not the first to step up and stand against this?

I still don't know what to say. But it's unacceptable to say nothing.

To my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I am so sorry. I can never, ever be sorry enough, and my crying for your people doesn't make it better, and I'm this American girl who went to Torah school once, with a roof over her head and a full pantry, and I don't know what to say or do but to stand with you in saying this is unacceptable, and in naming it genocide.

Saying nothing is unacceptable.

olive trees

I caught the phrase just before it left my lips and was covered in shame. It was a happy thing, said to me for my whole childhood, a hopeful thing with the concrete meaning squeezed out--something to say whatever it is, it'll be better soon, we have something better laid out for us.

Every year, over dinner, we would say this. Every year, lighting candles, we would say this. In high school, we even sang it.

But looking my Palestinian sister in the eye as she recounted the uncountable sufferings of her people, the enormity of that phrase, and what it meant, punched me in the gut.

When I was a child in Torah school--I went to Sunday school at my father's synagogue, and often Mass at my mother's church--they passed the collection can every week to plant trees in Israel, on farms--settlement farms. They tried to recruit us to visit and work on the settlements, as students, as tourists, as residents invoking a mystical "right of return." They never mentioned that the land was stolen. They erased the people who lived there--our cousins!--their greatness, their pushing-aside, their murder. They committed the ultimate genocide: erasing even the truth that the dead and the living pushed out of that homeland had ever existed. And all the while we lit candles for Yom ha-Shoah and ate "Israeli food" for lunch, which was Palestinian food appropriated, repackaged, renamed.

Hearing the pain of my Palestinian sister covered me in shame for not knowing. I had supported her cause, I thought, before. But the enormity of that phrase--that hopeful phrase--had never come home before. I had been so close to saying it out loud, forgetting what it meant, forgetting its bloody conclusions, forgetting the lie of an empty land ready to walk into that it encapsulated. Forgetting that the hope it presented was the hope of stealing a home from breathing families and taking part in their brutal subjugation. Forgetting all that I had read and heard and seen of a racist, colonialist regime that used my name to justify a thousand indignities and vicious wounds to a people who never asked for it, who never did anything to us. What happened to my Jewish people in the last century, what still happens in places, is unacceptable. What we have done in return is not only inexcusable, it is, in light of our own history, incomprehensible.

I almost said it aloud, and I am covered in shame that I never saw it clearly before, that I had let it go unexamined, that I could be so insensitive on such a towering level.

I was this close, before I caught myself and thought better, my lips frozen just in time.


"Next year in Jerusalem."

hanging around in the lost and found

If you're a student of ancient history, you've probably stumbled across silphium, or something like it.
Silphium is all over the literature of the ancient Mediterranean. It was used extensively by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and probably the Phoenicians and the Berbers and other North Africans--that is, anyone near enough to the areas it could be found to grab a handful. And "extensively" is not an exaggeration: the Hellenes record using silphium as a sovereign remedy for everything from headaches to fevers, as a birth control and an abortifacient, even as a popular cooking spice. An entire city's economy ran on it, and ran well. It was pictured on currency, pastoral pieces were written about people harvesting it, ancient doctors raved about its myriad uses. It was considered priceless.

There trouble is, we don't know what silphium was.

We know silphium was a plant that grew wild around the Mediterranean, especially along the African coast, and that it was hard to cultivate its most potent varieties in any kind of quantity, so it was encouraged to grow wild all over the place. We have rough pictures of it, stamped on coins and painted on pottery. We have descriptions of the way it was processed down into medicine, down to the ungodly reek that potsfull of its resin produced. We even now have documents pointing out other plants that some of its proponents believed were similar or related to it; asafoetida, which we still have, was considered a poor substitute by Roman physicians, for instance. But none of those ancient readers felt the need to identify which plant silphium was in any detail.

The trouble for those of us now reading is that there was never any need to explain what silphium was, or describe it in detail, because it was so ubiquitous that it must have seemed silly to do so. Nobody in a modern conversation or a modern novel hands a bottle of aspirin to a friend, pausing to note, 'This is an aspirin pill, a small bit of compressed powder of synthesized willow salic, a chemical derived from the bark of the willow tree. We use it as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller despite its deleterious effects on the liver and stomach.' And indeed, few of us reaching for that bottle of pills know where aspirin comes from. It's everywhere. There's no need to know; you can trust that the people who made it knew what they were doing and where they got it, and that when you put it on your grocery list, whoever reads it will know what you mean. Casually describing the rest of it comes off as redundant, pretentious, and unnatural.
We know where silphium fits in the ancient Mediterranean. We have a rough idea of what it might have looked like, a few snatches about the smell, some idea of other plants related to it. We can guess, with reasonable accuracy, that it was probably an extinct relative of fennel and parsley, of all things. But nobody felt the need to leave us an elaborate map pointing at where to find this sovereign remedy, this popular cure-all. They assumed it would always be around, and that our parents would be able to tell us, and their parents tell them. And somewhere around a thousand and a half years ago, that got shaken up, and it was gone forever, due to overcultivation, or desertification of the southern Mediterranean, or simple neglect. Maybe there's still a few clumps of it in Tunisia that someone drives by every day without knowing.

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don't have them any more, and we're different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There's an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that's really song lyrics, but we don't have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn't need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don't even know the names of, any more--huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

When I first began my transition, I searched desperately for context. I grew up in a small town surrounded by miles and miles of sagebrush and juniper and lava rock, where storms would come rolling down from the north and have nothing to stop them for the length of another three states. Nobody gave me patterns for what I was going through. Nobody gave me a starting place. I was off the map. So being who I am, I ran for the library, and I pulled out every book I could. And in between all of the autobiographies and sociology and theory, I was shocked to discover that there were all these rough pictures, throughout history, of people going through something that looked similar.

It wasn't the same, I later found out. They had other cultural contexts, in different times and places, with different tools and ideas to manage what looked very much like gendered lives outside of a biology-bound binary. I looked, though, at those stone tablets, at those translated manuscripts, at those colonialist records of destruction, and I found not only people familiar to me, but societies that had places for them.
Often enough, it wasn't explicit. There were words that were considered hard to translate, or that had no English equivalent at all. There were pictures of people who didn't seem like the other men or women in their societies. There were references, here and there, to crossing boundaries of physical sex. There were records of social and work roles. Some were more complete and detailed, though often colored with the confusion and disgust of colonizers and cultural imperialists. Some were the vaguest of conjectures. Some were just indications of where certain kind of people fit, how they dressed, what they ate, what they did, who they loved, without specifying who they were; why do so? Everyone knew who was being talked about. It was elementary.
Like many before me, I ran up against too many missing pieces to get those shattered pieces of human life back. Even extant examples of living, breathing people in parts of the world far from me were irrevocably altered by colonization, globalization, and the inevitable turning of time, and I found little desire to exacerbate that process with my own intellectual invasions. I had substitutes to find, and bits of culture or idea that, by crude replication or convergent evolution, performed similar work in my own cultural context, in my own life. There were relatives in that family tree I could cobble together. But those histories, no matter how important and how much they informed my own approaches, were histories. What they recorded was gone for good, and even if I could take it back I in most cases had no right to. Ci songs had gone tuneless. Silphium was extinct, or missing, but certainly out of reach forever, and something else would have to take its place if its kernel could not be found hiding somewhere. Whatever was left of it was changed enough to be unrecognizable, buried under centuries of sand and silence.

Somewhere in there desertification set in, or maybe over-farming, or maybe unsustainable harvests, or maybe simple neglect. Maybe it was just wholesale murder. One way or another, the gears and tides of history moved on, and something our ancestors or their neighbors had--had so much of they took it for granted, that they never felt the need to explain it for posterity because it was elementary, because it was easy, because it would always be around, because it was so normal as to be an absurd object of study--went away and didn't come back.
There were cures that disappeared, people there stopped being room for, solidarities that were so commonplace as to be unremarkable until they dissolved into dust or were stomped into oblivion.
Some of them we need now, and we find that empty space, between the potsherds and the pastoral poetry, where once was something that could have done us some good. And we're left with the task of finding it again, or finding replacements. Human stories and human objects and human lives were lost. How do we rebuild? How do we cobble together new cultural spaces, new cure-alls, new places to fit something that we ourselves will someday take for granted so thoroughly that our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder what we're talking about?
And when we rebuild--how do we preserve it? How do we take these tools and keep them safe so our descendants will know what they were, and be able to make use of them? How can I describe my life, and written where, so that it will be helpful to those who come after? How can we make our hearts' work stick, our solidarities solid? How can we make sure our replacements don't need replacing?

There were times and there are places not my own, where someone like me might find a place that looks like home. I, and others like me, am tasked with finding something that works for me and for those on whose behalf I've chosen to work in the here and now. We have to cultivate, and harvest, cures for our own society's stumblings and sicknesses. And if we succeed so thoroughly that what we distill is accessible to everyone, what then? How do we weather history? How do we keep the places we build, the growth we achieve, the linked arms and shared voices we hold together from losing their meaning the more they grow?

Maybe we need to start by looking at what's already been lost. Maybe we need to understand what's missing and that much of what we ourselves become will someday go missing, too, and that it's up to us to make sure the important parts are still there for those who will come after us. Maybe it's just a matter of not assuming that these things we hold dear will be there when we're gone, and doing a little more work to make sure that even if our own fields are someday empty of them, that they grow wild somewhere else.

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?

the seam of skin and scales

I am not a woman trapped in a man's body. This body is no man's; it is mine, it is me, and there is no man in that equation. And I am not trapped in it. There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they're right.

This body is mine, and I claim it and its bruises, and it is not a man's, and I am not trapped here. I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no. There is too much to do, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say hell no and help them say the same.
You might not like it. It might be a wrongness to you.

I am done with traps. I am done with the philosophy of traps, and I am done with the feminism of who owns my body for what cause.
It is time for something that tells you that I am here for blood--my blood, the blood of my loved ones, the blood of the people who have battered themselves against my life and found me still here.


It is time for a feminism of the monstrous.


That is this body. That is this me. That is the voice that says get your names off of my parts and your hands off them too, that says stop colonizing my reality and telling me what I mean without listening to a word I say.

What I say may be in a language incomprehensible, but there is a time for that, and it is right now, because this is a monster's creed. It is for the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on. It is for the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy. I am not what you suppose me to be and until you listen to my voice and look me in my eyes, I will cling fast to this life no matter how far you drive me, how deep, with how many torches and pitchforks, biting back the whole way down. I will not give you my suicide. I will not give you my surrender.

This is for the Lilim, because you forget that the next part after your co-opted icon parts ways with Adam and goes her own way is and she begat monsters, and she becomes terrifying. This is for the Gorgons and the vampires and the chimaeras, for Cybele and Baba Yaga, Hel and Ashtoreth, for Lamia and Scylla, for Kali and Kapo 'ula-kina'u. This is for all of them with teeth.

It is time to look the monstrous in the eye. It is time. It is time to say that we are beautiful in our fierceness, and that we are our own. We are not the rejected of what we can never be. We are what we were meant to be. We are not pieces of wholes thrown together incorrectly. We are not mistakes.
We are not inferior knockoffs of someone else. If our monstrousness is frightening, then it is time we bare our teeth and draw that fear close to us and stop being so afraid of our fearsomeness that we fear everyone and everything else right back.

I am throwing my head back, here, and saying it: no more being afraid. Hell no. My monstrousness is not a place of shame. It is a strength. It is the power to say I am mine, and I will tell you what I mean. Not you. I am not any thing trapped in anyone's body. I am tougher than that, and I have plenty of blood to spare in this body of mine, and plenty more miles to go before any of you can bring me to my knees, and I dare you to try.

I am choosing to stay here, and it is mine to choose. And if that means changing shape, if that means putting together the unexpected, that is any monster's ancient right. It is damn well traditional.
The only ones setting traps are the ones in our way.
There. There's my teeth. There's my cause.

Boo.
Hiss.
Keep kicking: a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on. And so. Did. I.

shoring up the levees

Okay, so Blackamazon and Brownfemipower have thrown up their hands in pretty understandable frustration at the Various Messes going on right now.
I know things will chill out soon, but in the meantime, if anyone wanted to continue the conversations going on in their threads--I know BFP's place was developing what I thought was a very interesting discussion of postcolonial feminism and the impact of colonial history on trans issues and multiracial identities--please feel free to continue in comments on this entry.

I am not interested in reproducing the bickering going on in both those threads, involving a certain commenter, that is scuttling those excellent discussions. You know who you are: you're welcome here, but I will be moderating this thread.

In the meantime, BA, BFP, put your feet up, seriously, and have a drink on me. You've been heroes here. Let me host some mess at my place for a while so you can catch a breath, if you want. Thank you.

Look, guys, we've already lost a really excellent blogger recently, probably for good. (And kudos to her for doing what she has to to take care of herself.) I don't want the pressure-cooker doing any other ones harm.

So. Talk amongst yourselves.

against the dying of the light

In late 2003, I had dinner with a man who had spent his life fighting the apartheid government in South Africa. He said a lot of things that night that I took to heart, but one chilled everyone at the table:
"In all my years running from the government of my homeland, hiding from the police, in jail, in the streets, standing against that oppression, I was never so frightened as I am travelling in America today."
We asked him why, of course, being Americans, and being shocked.
"Because in apartheid South Africa, if the police kicked down your door and locked you up on trumped-up charges, your family and friends would protest, they would know it was wrong, they would fight for your freedom, even if they failed. In America, if you were locked up and the government levied false charges or held you without trial, your family--your family--would say, well, maybe we didn't know him so well. Maybe the government knows something we don't."
It was quiet for a little while.

I'm sorry I didn't tell enough people, Farid. Thank you for trying.

on cartography and dissection

When you're Other, there's this funny thing, especially if you're seen as a mix of something and something else. (Races, sexes, parts of reality. The atoms and their combinations are legion, of course.) They had a way of dealing with this in old texts, after all. There's a place on the Center's nice precise map for the country you live in.

It's got that little face blowing wind on it, maybe, or sea serpents grinning and looping. It's labeled "Here Be Monsters." The coastlines fade off into dotted lines, blurs, guesses. Nobody comes back from there, they'll tell you. It's the edge of the world. It's a savage land. Mostly you know this: nobody knows anything, but there are guesses. There are stories. There are Herodotus' dog-headed men and gold-digging ants, Californian island flower queens, there are Sima Qian's tattooed dragon-men of the steaming South. The Isle of Glass, the Western Blackness, the Kingdom of Prester John.

The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Here Be Monsters. Things like Us, like people, but different. They're cannibals, they're mermaids and sea-bishops, they're pale and bearded and travel in boats with great seagulls pulling them forward with the wind. They have three bodies and one head; they smoke the leaves of a tree that makes them behave as Greek men do when drunk on wine.

Monsters are off the map, and the bigger our maps get, the less room for them there are; they either fade in, assimilate, become familiar, or they're driven further into the wilds and from there to extinction. Monsters and facts don't mix. Monsters are made of stories and conjecture. They're part this--a thing we know--and part that, a thing we don't, or a thing we do, but mashed together all wrong.

Maybe it sounds familiar, by now. Maybe, like me, you recognize yourself. You look at the coastlines of your skin, fading into gulfs and seas of the Center's borders, washing up on your beaches, and you hear, across the water, those words: Here Be Monsters. You hear them inking it onto you, steering well clear or making a beeline for savage lands to tame and profit from. You know your insides are not navigable. You know that no matter how you say, look, I can tell you where you are, you're right here, all you will hear back is a new name given to you, the Undiscovered Country.

Wave your arms and shout, if you like. I'm doing it, too. You'll still hear the question: What are you?
I'm not a what.
Yeah, but what are you?

Not an Us, see? You're an Other. You're a fantastical thing of a foreign land, no matter how much you can learn to recognize Them as part of your Us, as like you, they'll be...curious, or afraid, or both. And busy, meanwhile, planting flags, colonizing your reality, calling this Squaw Hill and that New Hampshire, and they will probably not even recognize that you had names for your parts, you had words, you could have told them your own story.
It'll be pieced together, instead, from explorer's accounts and schoolyard rumor and careful, scientific study of specimens, while you're waving your arms.

It's an interesting thing, to be the bushman in the zoo, to be Herculine Barbin, to be the subject of an ethnography instead of an autobiography, to be rendered in someone else's symbols. Those of us who survive learn to become bilingual, learn to be Sacagaweas or Zizous. (Some learn to be Hannibals and Owain Glyndwrs and Mangal Pandays, instead; one way or another, it ends messily, then.) Sometimes you're lucky enough to be named by your neighbors for the colonist, instead: 'these are the Eaters of Raw Meat, o guest, who live to the north.' 'This is my gay friend Tim, who's gay. He's an artist, aren't you, y'big homo? Anyway, I hope that doesn't bother you.'

And there it is: you're illuminated in a manuscript, a centaur, a Celestial, an Eskimo, a manticore, an autogynephiliac. You're made of stories, and your own voice is generally drowned out by them. You're a Monster, and it ain't your Here to Be in any more. You're the one brown kid in someone else's town. You're the transsexual etherized upon the table. Monsters aren't in their own stories; they're in someone else's, some Center's, some subject's object. They guard treasure Real People can take, or they can be killed for a trophy, to be a proof of belonging and earned renown in the world outside the unmapped place they lurk. They're there to advance the plot, but nobody ever asks what the look on Medusa's face was when she saw her own reflection for the first time. Nobody ever asks why the Chimaera needs killing; it's a lone thing, a wrongness, a distortion wandering in from elsewhere, burning the straight-plowed fields of Us. Huddle in your cave with me, monster. Can you hear someone else's heroes coming?

Maybe you can claim some thirdspace, you can pick among places given you, you can believe the hype about your Magic Insight Into Other People's Gender or be someone's Gosh, That's Really A Lesson For Us All. You can play the shaman, live on the edge of the village; you can play Cheiron and train Real People's heroes. Me, I refuse to be here For Them, as much as possible, no matter how much I care for them as part of my human race. I will not be a cipher. I'd rather be a monster than that, some days, even though there's really only one way a monster's story ends, even a tame monster's, and it has to do with poison arrows.

So, you wanna plant your flag? Well, Here Be a Monster. Make me one, and I will go bump in your night, I will do it with teeth. You get what you continually, noisily, unlisteningly expect, eventually. It's that or partnership, letting me fill in my country's map in yours, letting us exchange and converse, admitting that to each, the other can be navigable, if only you let the territory speak for itself.

You're not discovering me. I was already here.

on the nutritional value of trolls

So, in duking it out with one of the anti-marriage-equality trolls who hit Feministe a month or so ago, I crystallized an argument I'd been meaning to make for a long time and hadn't quite articulated. Fitzie, bubbelah, wherever you're trolling, I hope you appreciate that you gave a marriage-equality activist a hand up in making her arguments cohere.
The distilled problem is the difficulty I have with the phrase "traditional marriage"--and all the arguments that go, "all throughout human history, marriage has..."
It hasn't, kiddo. It's varied vastly, place to place, time to time. "Religion" doesn't claim it as one way--even within one given religious tradtion, there's huge variation and development, and the distances between prescription and description when you're trying to figure out what our collective ancestors did is vast. (Compare same-sex eroticism in the early Sufi community despite official condemnation of same among contemporary Muslims, for instance, or the massive gay subculture in 1920s New York.)
What these arguments are about are "my religion," "my culture," and "my history," as opposed to yours, which it's better than. How do we know it's better? It's more prevalent right now. Why's that? Because "my" culture is borne by people more powerful than "yours," as things stand, right now. And why are they more powerful? Because they killed a lot of your ancestors, mostly.
So how's it boil down, oversimplified? Your ancestors killed mine and changed their cultural norms, disrupting their societies and causing them to change to adapt to rules, some of which indeed work for you, but which aren't necessarily good for them because human societies differ. Who's asking who to "redefine marriage"? Who's asking for tradition to be abandoned, family structures to alter, religious values to be put aside? (This is a general "my" and "your," of course; being mixed-race, part colonized, part colonizer, my ancestors are responsible for doing this to my other ancestors, a lot of the time.)
These arguments were framed in that particular thread as yet another "poor little oppressed us, you're trying to force us into this grand social experiment where you redefine marriage to mean anything you want. Without my particular standards, there can't be any standards at all, and you'll dismantle the institution 'marriage' itself, thus dissolving society, because you have no values and think everything is relative." And any arguments trying for, I don't know, nuance, were ignored.
It's not a defensive stance, no matter how it's framed. It's not "please leave my cultural values alone," because nobody is asking them to dissolve their marriages, reorder their families, change their church ceremonies. Nobody's even really demanding that given denominations, say, change their teachings on queer issues. They're just asking that other versions be allowed to exist, too, and treated equally. And these folks argue that that mere fact of coexistence will obliterate them, because that's where the argument falls apart: it's not defensive at all. It's offensive. It's an attempt, either knowing or unknowing, to wipe out other sets of cultural norms.

So, well, I called bullshit.
It went something like this:

Whose traditions? I know a goodly number of my ancestors belonged to cultures where marriage was not held to be strictly between a man and a woman as you’d define them. Even given that your culture dictates the tradition that one man and one woman [is] the only acceptable form of marriage, and those two people are involved for childrearing, and other people aren’t involved in that–even given those premises–why are your traditions, your culture, and your family structures better than mine?
Why is it that my culture might suggest that adults other than the parents ought to be involved in helping raise children, which ought to ensure multiply-gendered adults in the family structure no matter who the parents are, rendering your point about isolated same-sex pairs moot? Why should I listen to your cultural values, which apparently dictate that if one biological parent leaves their spouse, the other is all alone to raise the kid, instead of our model, where enough people are involved to *really* think about the children–not to mention caring for the grandparents? Why should I throw away centuries or millennia of precedent for transgender social roles and same-sex committed relationships that have worked for my ancestors for your traditions, which relegate the people who need those cultural spaces to the margins? What’s wrong with my family, and what makes yours so much better?
And why, you might ask, don’t *I* try to force *you* into conforming to *my* cultural values?

*******
(later, after a total nonresponse:)

You still haven’t addressed basic flaws in these arguments. Would you disallow infertile heterosexual couples from having their marriage recognized? Couples who don’t want to have children? Couples who’ve had hysterectomy, vasectomy, or similar procedures? Would you ask that the intersexed not be allowed to marry, as many of them cannot ‘produce offspring’ and/or don’t tidily fit into your system?

[...]

And you still haven’t answered my question as to why your traditions are better than mine or anyone else’s. Or, for that matter, why yours are better than those of mainstream Protestant Christian organizations like the United Methodists and United Church of Christ, let alone the Unitarians and the Metropolitan Community Church, let alone the majority of American Jewry, leaving entirely aside religions neither Jewish nor Christian, for the sake of simplicity? If those denominations are performing marriages to both same-sex and heterosex couples, why are some of the marriages they perform and bless not good enough for government recognition? Do you believe that some religions or sects ought not be honored equally under the law?
Come on–address even a little of this, please. The list goes on over here, too.

*******
(and again, none of the points are addressed, because, well, he's a troll:)

You’re not listening[...] I’m not throwing out history or precedent or tradition. I’m pointing out that there are more histories than yours. I’m pointing out that I’m not ‘redefining’, but rather, that there are a whole lot of people on this earth, and a whole lot of traditions, some going back millennia, that use a different definition of ‘marriage’ than you do, and you still haven’t provided any good reason to pretend they don’t exist and make everyone use the definition you and yours use.

You haven’t addressed any of the questions I posed. You evaded all of them by insisting that to suggest that there are other definitions of what constitutes marriage means throwing out any defintions at all, or that suggesting there are other kinds of marriage than your tradition’s version equals claiming anything can be a marriage–which is not, indeed, what I’ve asserted. You haven’t dealt with the question of the numerous Jewish and Christian organizations who don’t seem to feel that same-sex unions are objectionable or counter to Biblical authority. You haven’t dealt with the question of the numerous heterosexual couples who cannot have children and whether or not they ought to be allowed marriage. You devalue the families who adopt. You refuse to deal with intersexed people, let alone the transgendered. In short, I’ve brought up factual things that exist, and asked you your opinion of them; and you’ve covered your ears and eyes because you don’t seem to want to acknowledge their existence. This convinces me that you’re not serious about this debate in the slightest; you’re not even participating in it.

Some of us have long histories that involve traditions different from yours. Some of us have ancestors that were doing same-sex unions when Paris was a collection of huts and New York was a grassy field and the Hebrews were still slaves in Egypt. And by all accounts, our societies worked just fine, and the disruption of people insisting on your traditions have thrown them into chaos. Why should we participate in your grand social experiment of forcing everyone into cisgendered heterosexual unions, instead of honoring them for those who want them and making room for the minority who don’t? Why should we stop honoring members of our communities who we value just because you don’t? Why should we throw away our history and our precedent just because your relatives showed up at our doorsteps and forced us to redefine marriage in a way that served you–at times, yes, selfishly and inhumanely?

Our standard explicitly states that family is important and that children ought to be raised in stable homes by responsible, loving adults, and it works for us. Just because you choose to redefine ‘family’ to mean only what your kind of family is, why make the rest of us come along? We have institutions, too. We have cherished families, histories, and ‘biological’ realities. And we’re not asking you to change *your* family. So are you going to answer any of these questions, or are you going to keep sidestepping, compadre?

And that, as they say, was that. My interlocutor's arguments are available at the link, of course; it was sort of hopeless. But that's not the point; the point is, I finally nailed this part of my own argument down. I'm tired of this being framed as a religion v. secularism debate or a tradition v. innovation debate. It's not, not always. For a lot of us, it's our own traditions, own own societies' once-places for us, being taken away by, yes, "foreign invasion"--by cultural imperialism. And it's time for us to take that discourse back. This isn't just an issue of church-state separation--it's also an issue of religious equality and cultural hegemony. And those of us being figuratively shoved out of our own houses and being pushed into, say, an atheistic-nontraditional camp just because we don't agree with one religious sect of one culture's traditions? We. Are not. Pleased.
Even when we're friends with a lot of those atheists and nontraditionalists.