Hello from Paris!
So, after I got my first vaccine over a week ago, the only thing that hurt was my arm. But a couple days later I suddenly felt kind of fluey, went to bed early, and woke at 3 A.M. totally panicked that after all these months of anguished, practically paranoid, carefulness I’d managed to get Covid, now, just a few weeks before I’ll be immune.
I figure my little panic attack was a combination of severe allergies (thank you, blooming trees) and my brain seizing on an obvious fear to distract itself from my other, more pernicious struggles.
And I am struggling. Struggling with a radically changed LGBT community, and questioning if—after working for it for more than thirty years—I still have a place in it.
I got my introduction to activism with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization in New York, then I did the Lesbian Avengers for a couple of years. After that I worked over two decades as a community journalist, including a seven-year bootcamp with The Girl at The Gully online magazine “queer views on everything” where we thought more broadly about LGBT issues—including gender—and especially how we fit into the broader project of democracy.
Not that American queers care about democracy. Even after 9/11 that was only a Republican talking point. Nope, nobody cared until Trump. When suddenly people were screaming about the rule of law and my god, the Constitution. All of which has already faded in their memories. They’ve doubled down on making political proclamations, then sneering at the very idea that a reasonable person, a good person, could hold a different opinion, “No discussion. Period,” they say. With the same arrogance as Trump.
Nobody seems to notice that we owe all our rights to it—that frail thing democracy. And its pre-condition: free speech. Nobody cares that it’s eroded when you leave behind reason, debate, twist language, refuse reality. Even if it happens on a tiny stage.
Like that time I wrote a Gay City column calling out the obvious misogyny of some trans activists and their allies—because what else can you call it when somebody threatens “cis” women with rape and mutilation and murder?—and the online queer crowd decided the bigots weren’t the threateners, but me, a monster, a Hitler, a transphobe, a TERF—who should immediately be punched.
I can’t get over it. I can’t get over how not one single person, not an L, or G, or B, or T could be bothered to say, “My goodness, that is “problematic” threatening to rip out someone’s vagina or set someone on fire if they disagree with you.” Especially when tens of thousands of women and girls all over the world are tortured, raped, enslaved, mutilated and killed every hour while we look elsewhere. Not one.
And I’m reminded of it every day, our persistent scorn for sexed bodies of the female kind.
Like in France last week, when Mounir Boutaa killed his wife Chahinez Daoud in broad daylight, shooting her in the middle of the street, and when she was down on the ground pouring some flammable liquid on her and setting her alight. It’s not that the cops didn’t know he was a problem. He’d just gotten out of prison for domestic violence. They just didn’t care enough to protect her.
Or this bit of news from Afghanistan: Children among at least 55 killed in bomb attack on Kabul school. The “children” (as reported by Sky News in Britain) were mostly female students between 11 and 15 years old, who were leaving school at the time of the attack. In short, they were girls killed for being girls wanting to go to school and get educated instead of marrying at 12, servicing some old goat, and popping babies until they died on a bloody bed.
Here’s much better coverage.
Bombing Outside Afghan School Kills at Least 50, With Girls as Targets. The attack, which came at the end of a particularly violent week, underlined growing concerns about the American troop withdrawal.
‘Why Do We Deserve to Die?’ Kabul’s Hazaras Bury Their Daughters.
A bomb attack that killed scores of schoolgirls, members of a long-persecuted minority, offered still more evidence that Afghanistan may be on the verge of unraveling.
The there’s the following tweet (in French) which leads to a thread by a woman describing the incredibly common female experience of getting approached by some guy, “Hey good-looking. What’s up?” And what happens when she says she’s busy and doesn’t want to chat.
Spoiler alert! He follows her for several increasingly frightening minutes.
The relentless harassment culminates when he grabs her shoulder, and demands engagement. “Hey, don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. It’s just that I think you’re pretty and I’d like to talk. Why won’t you talk to me?”
Nope, women alone are never a target. Men don’t feel entitled at all to interrupt us and talk to us, comment on our appearances. Refuse to go away. Follow us if they feel like it. Scare the crap out of us.
Nope, our female bodies don’t matter at all.
It’s not big news when German Gymnasts Cover Their Legs In Stand Against Sexualization. And refuse to wear those stupid all-exposing leotards.
Female writers like Virginia Woolf are always given their dues.
No woman will regret the end of mask-wearing.
I can’t stand it anymore.
It’s really fucking unbearable that there’s no way, no place in the U.S. to talk rationally about gender and sex and misogyny. Or talk rationally at all. Like grown-ups in a democracy. I’d especially like to chat about why, when categories exist and we accept them in every part of our lives, the category of female is unthinkable? It’s like we’ve forgotten, too, that language itself is nothing but a system of meaning, of categories which both exclude and contain other categories. A maple is a tree and not a bird, though both fall into the category of carbon-based life forms which will exist in all their glorious differences whether we have a word for them or not. And so what?
The thing is, the existence of categories is morally neutral. We do not live in a grey world of undifferentiated mush. A female has characteristics that a male does not. Both have demonstrable consequences. There is no third human gamete, though Nature as always produces variants on her themes. What’s so scary about admitting any of this?
What we are in control of is the value we assign to those categories. And the ideas that we associate with them which go far beyond the material fact of their existence. That’s where the bullshit comes in. That’s what needs to be re-examined and transformed—for all our sakes, because I’m absolutely sure that ignoring our embodied, physical existence isn’t just bad for dykes and for females, it’ll bite trans people in the ass one of these days. You mark my words. (Shakes cane.)
There’s a new book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, that’s taking on the question. I saw an interesting conversation between the author Kathleen Stock and journalist Suzanne Moore.
Also, here’s a great article about wolves which I find totally relevant. But maybe you won’t. The point being about how errors of fact and interpretation enter fields of research and fuck things up for decades.
I’ll give the last word to Demeter.
Please send Xanax,