US Government rules on Gender Identity

[slomo]

^^^^ And it occurs to me just right now (since this is a conspiracy theory board and all) that Caitlyn Jenner may have been weaponized precisely for this purpose: to make sure the pendulum swings back as far to the right as possible.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

It's funny because it looks like you guys (guruilla and agent orange cooper) are saying committing the crime is cause for revoking their status as a "woman" as if women don't commit crimes...

N-no... what I'm saying is that categorizing Dana Rivers or Aliea Rose brown as 'women' who committed these horrendous crimes is misleading at best, and completely insane at worst. It adds them to the category of 'women who commit crimes,' increasing the statistics for female violence, when in fact, no, they are just men in dresses, committing the same old male violence we're all used to by now. Women can now be legally lumped into the pile of crimes committed by men, even though it was men who committed the crime! It's institutionalized insanity.

[guruilla]

A point of clarification. I have no wish to tell any man that he can't take estrogen, wear a wig, skirt, and lipstick, and call himself a woman. I'll even indulge his fantasies by applying female pronouns. If (s)he's an interesting person, I'll even have a beer with him(her), and judge him(her) on the merits of his(her) overall character.

But I will also simultaneously defend the right of any and every lesbian to reject him(her) as a sexual partner with the transparently obvious justification that this person is not, in any meaningful sexual sense relevant to most lesbians and straight men, a "woman".

I'm not one for defending rights since I find the whole notion of rights to be problematic (it presumes some power that is bestowing them, and what such a Power gives, it can also take away). By the same token I'm not interested in restricting anyone's behaviors until they directly infringe on me or those I care about (the key word being directly). I am OK with catering to someone’s fantasies up to a point, keeping in mind that pretending to believe something I don’t believe can be harmful to myself and the person I am indulging. I don’t drink beers so the last point is moot for me.

On the flip side, regarding “defending someone’s rights” to say no, whether it’s saying no to having a man-who-identifies-as-a woman allowed in the women’s toilets, saying no to that person’s desire to have sex with them, or saying no to his/her insistence s/he be identified as a different sex than they in fact are, all these things are equally essential when it comes to respecting other people’s sense of reality.

Transgender as a social phenomenon did not have to be invasive, identity-hijacking, or reality-distorting, and for many centuries it seems as though it wasn’t. But now it is, so now it becomes an issue and now the question of what causes a person to want to self-identify as the opposite sex, and to believe and assert that biology is a social construct, has also become pressing (for me, at any rate). In this regard I am a simple guy, so when I speak of biological sex I am talking about whether the person has a penis or a vagina, and that’s it. I don’t really care that much about the “gender spectrum within” because it’s not actually relevant when it comes to determining whether a person is biologically a man or a woman. It is relevant to how they experience their sexuality, of course, & I am all for keeping the discussion open about that; but not when it’s been founded on a faulty premise such as that sex (i.e. masculine or feminine) is a social construct.

If you start with a fallacy, then everything that’s built on that foundation is going to be fallacious thereafter, and only get further and further from the ground of our experience, which is the body and not the mind.

What disturbs me about all this is NOT men who want to be women; it’s not even that, by doing so, they are potentially hijacking women’s identities and hard-earned sense of their reality. It’s when people are telling me what I can think or say, what is true or false, based on personal drives to mold the world (and me) in their own image. This is reality distortion and I won’t (in fact I can’t) knowingly participate in reality distortion. Contrary to New Age beliefs & neoliberalism, reality isn’t something we get to shape according to our whims. It’s something we have to work a lifetime to reconnect to, and only by surrendering all of those whims and preferences to find out what’s left when we stop “believing.”

And I will also simultaneously assert the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, given that it is a model that accurately describes 99.99% of the human population.

For the rubes likes me, that biological sex is more than simply what kind of genitalia we have; absolutely.

Haha, facts are mediated too. That sort of feels like one topic of this board... getting to the foundations of factual reportage is tough when "conspiracy" shortcuts seem almost necessary on the route there..

That's why I asked what you had in mind if not facts. Referring to the body & sense data is basically all we have (short of that mysterious soul-transmission, which only seems to reach awareness via the body); so the moment checking what junk you have in your pants isn't enough for you to know, for a fact, what sex you are, the matrix has you.

I might agree with you guruilla that saying you're a woman doesn't make it so, but for many this IS a fact and they refer to it as such. It's very important to treat it as a fact if you work for certain institutions, for example

Which is what articles like those cited by AOC are catering to & reinforcing, and what's being criticized here, which you seemed to find objectionable, somehow.

We can acknowledge that something IS a fact to someone without losing sight of our own awareness that it is not in fact, true. For Tom O'Caroll, it's a FACT that some children are coming onto him and that he is only helping them explore their sexuality. And there are insitutions that will back him up there, too (albeit less publicly)

If we don't believe trans woman is really a woman then I don't see what any crimes they might have committed have to do with it

Huh?

[tapitsbo]

do you guys need the crime stories to back up the rest of what you're saying, is all I meant

I don't think "a woman is someone who doesn't commit violent crime" is a message that really holds up itself - not something implied here maybe but in my opinion that is a sort of message I've heard before

[guruilla]

do you guys need the crime stories to back up the rest of what you're saying, is all I meant

I don't think "a woman is someone who doesn't commit violent crime" is a message that really holds up itself - not something implied here maybe but in my opinion that is a sort of message I've heard before

Agreed, and already discussed here. I see that part as irrelevant; it's misrepresentation of reality that's the issue here, not slandering of women.

[slomo]

do you guys need the crime stories to back up the rest of what you're saying, is all I meant

I don't think "a woman is someone who doesn't commit violent crime" is a message that really holds up itself - not something implied here maybe but in my opinion that is a sort of message I've heard before

Agreed, and already discussed here. I see that part as irrelevant; it's misrepresentation of reality that's the issue here, not slandering of women.

Indeed. I do have some issues with certain ideologies that assert that women are somehow morally superior to men as a class (they're not, they just tend to favor different kinds of evil acts than men do, because, as a class, they have different motives and opportunities). But I have a much bigger problem with people who are willfully misrepresenting reality to the extent that we now, as a society, can't trust the junk in our own pants.

[Project Willow]

It is the misrepresentation of reality that is, in the context of these crimes, slandering of women, at least in terms of overall statistics.

[Heaven Swan]

Just some more details about the violent, disgusting, sick man who took it upon himself to murder two amazing lesbian women and their adopted son.

Update - more information about Dana Rivers, the murderer:

He allegedly left his first wife just after she gave birth because he was “jealous” of her ability to give birth.

He married his third wife, who was then 19, when he was her 37-year-old professor, making him a creepy rapist who leveraged his power to get a relationship with a student young enough to be his daughter.

He also wrote a lot of e-books he calls “taboo erotic age play fiction” aka written pedophilic fantasies about raping children and the simulated rape of children (source, please note csa warning).

He apparently wrote on an old website that his favorite part of teaching was taking the children on overnight trips, which, while not explicitly an admission of guilt to anything, is a pretty damning comment when combined with the knowledge that he married his barely-legal student and writes explicit pedophilic pornography.

And remember, for years this man has been a representative of the trans community – even before he was a murderer, when he was “just” a misogynistic, lesbophobic pedophile who took a special interest in harassing and terrorizing women for the crime of trying to spend a weekend in the woods without any men around.

After becoming a murderer, he remains a representative of the trans community: Violent, misogynistic, lesbophobic, a community chock full o’ pedophiles, rapists and murderers, where male violence can be excused and written off because men who say they want to be women can do no wrong.

(Full credit where credit is due: New information is courtesy of users at r/GenderCritical)

Update:

This misogynistic, lesbophobic murderer is currently being housed as a woman in Santa Rita Jail, where he constitutes a clear and present danger to all of the women he is housed with.

[Searcher08]

Well worth watching.

[tapitsbo]

Article discusses "transitioning" of one-and-a-half year olds.

How does this gel with the discussion in this thread?

http://www.businessinsider.com/demand-f ... ng-2016-12

Pediatrician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy uses a stethoscope and otoscope, of course. But running a clinic for transgender youth means her pediatric medical supplies also include a selection of silicone penises and chest-flattening binders.

Thanks to the openness of Caitlyn Jenner and others, public awareness of transgenderism — and demand for trans-specific medical care like counseling, hormone treatments, and genital surgery — is exploding, even for the youngest of patients. At the 30-plus clinics for transgender youth across the US, doctors like Olson-Kennedy can barely keep up with the demand.

Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital, for example, opened its trans clinic just four years ago but already has 500 patients — and a four-month waiting list. Seattle Children’s Hospital opened its clinic in October and immediately got scores of calls. Olson-Kennedy’s clinic, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is the country’s largest, treating 725 trans youth from across the western US. Five hundred of those patients are Olson-Kennedy’s.

Her youngest patient is 3.

What her patients share is the strong, almost certain, belief that they have been born into the wrong body. Their brains tell them they are one gender, their bodies another. Too often, Olson-Kennedy said, these kids have no one to help guide them or ease their pain or even offer routine medical care without disparaging them. “You sit in this room with these young people and see their distress so clearly,” said Olson, a 47-year-old California native. “It’s not OK to do nothing.”

So Olson-Kennedy battles. She fights with insurance companies, tangles with pediatric colleagues who think children are too young to transition, and persuades reluctant parents to help their distressed kids. She’s even taken on the authors of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” for not including a section on transgender children. And now, just as her fledgling field is beginning to gain medical and mainstream acceptance, she’s got a new adversary: President-elect Donald Trump, who many fear will erode the recent gains of the transgender community and cut access to the health care they need to transition.

"It’s my number one concern right now,” Olson-Kennedy said. “I’m very worried.”

But there are also signs of hope. Olson-Kennedy is helping lead the first National Institutes of Health grant for research on transgender youth, now in its second year. And she and others hope that data will help win out over discrimination.

Olson-Kennedy’s clinic sits on the fourth floor of a bank building on a busy stretch of Sunset Boulevard. In her office with a view of the iconic Hollywood sign, she counsels patients and their parents — a good many of whom have driven or flown from distant states to see her. She can spend hours getting to know a patient before beginning any medical treatment.

The youngest patients receive no medical interventions, just counseling. Olson-Kennedy describes one 18-month-old, born a girl, who understood her gender before her grammar. “I a boy,” she repeatedly told her parents. Many young children who experiment with gender roles end up reverting to their birth gender.

But when the gender discomfort persists into adolescence, said Olson-Kennedy, it’s usually there to stay. And puberty, when secondary sex characteristics develop, can be a dangerous trigger.

“I’ve had mothers call me who say their child tries to kill themselves every time they have their period,” Olson-Kennedy said. “Parents come in saying, ‘My kid tried to cut off his penis with dental floss.’”

Olson-Kennedy’s first line of treatment for adolescents is stopping puberty so children and their parents can buy time to sort out what they want to do. Puberty blockers, GnRh agonists like the injectable Lupron or the implant Supprelin, suppress puberty by modifying hormone release. Such drugs have been used off-label safely for more than 30 years to stop early puberty.

Trans doctors say it’s critical to stop puberty before the body morphs in ways that are difficult to change — the broadening of shoulders for men, for example, or the rounded hips of women. “Even 14 or 15 is too late,” said Dr. Norman Spack, an endocrinologist who founded the country’s first transgender youth clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Once children are ready to make a permanent change, they can stop puberty blockers and use masculinizing or feminizing hormones. Some trans youth go on to have surgery to remove breast tissue or add breast contours or alter their genitals. Others forego surgery and use binders and packers to alter their body shape.

While some religious groups oppose the process of transitioning — and radio host Laura Ingraham, in the running to be Donald Trump’s press secretary, told her listeners to wear adult diapers rather than use public bathrooms with people who are trans — Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues mostly ignore the flack. They say the care they are providing is not only reducing emotional distress but saving lives. Without support and treatment, Olson-Kennedy said, trans kids are a risk for almost everything: depression, self harm, substance abuse, homelessness, HIV and suicide.

Athena Fenstermacher was born male, but identified as a girl from her earliest days. “As soon as she could pick colors. As soon as she could talk,” said her mother, Jill. “There are pictures of me with a buzzcut and plastic heels and a Barbie,” Fenstermacher said. “I just knew I wasn’t born into the right body.”

Now 18, Fenstermacher is a petite and pretty blonde, demure, graceful and mature beyond her years. Living in nearby Long Beach, she found Olson-Kennedy at 15, after years of confusion and deciding she must be a gay male. “I didn’t even know transitioning existed until I was 14,” she said. “Everyone told me, ‘We don’t know what to do.’” Her treatment was further delayed by counselors who told her she had to undergo months of therapy before they would give her a referral to Olson-Kennedy. (While Olson-Kennedy said therapy is important, she said it should not be used as a roadblock to seeing a physician.)

Fenstermacher’s transition was excruciating. She attempted suicide, she said, after enduring extended bullying through high school and dealing with issues like trying to find a bathroom she could use comfortably. A 2015 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found a majority of transgender Americans avoid using public bathrooms, even going so far as to limit their food and water intake when away from home. For 8 percent of people surveyed, this led to urinary tract or kidney infections.

It all took a toll: Fenstermacher went from an honors student with a stellar GPA to barely passing. She ended up earning her degree at home. Now, she fights constant loneliness and a sense she’s always being stared at and appraised. She hasn’t been swimming in seven years and says her slightly wider shoulders make her feel like a linebacker. She’s wistful when she describes watching her younger sister develop into the body she wishes she could have had. And she’s angry at her own genetics and a world that won’t accept her.

Fenstermacher is willing to discuss her experience and care because she’s so appreciative of Olson-Kennedy and because she wants people to understand the intense pain that comes with struggling with your birth gender. But she flinches every time her physician says the word “trans.” That word, Fenstermacher said, sets people to gawking, making judgements, and scrutinizing.

“I don’t feel like a trans woman.” Fenstermacher said. “I feel like a woman.” The word trans, she said, conjures up extremes: the flamboyant models of “Strut” or wealthy trans women like Caitlyn Jenner who order up any medical or cosmetic treatment they want. “The battle is a little different when you can just walk out the door and get facial feminization surgery,” said Fenstermacher, who dresses simply in jeans and T-shirts and, with her mother, has struggled to pay for therapy, treatment, hormones, and the surgery she recently underwent at a private clinic in San Francisco.

Athena’s mother fully supported the transition. “When you see their pain, you do what you have to do,” she said. Divorced and a waitress, Jill Fenstermacher literally had to scrape and borrow to get the money for Athena’s care, which was only partially covered by insurance. The costs of getting a legal name change, changing Athena’s driver’s license, it all adds up. “I told her, ‘I don’t care if I have to sleep in my car, I’m helping you do this.’” She’s battled so much: school districts, insurance companies, therapists, doctors. “I’m like the front line for her,” Jill Fenstermacher said. “I try to protect her, but there’s so much discrimination.”

Not all doctors agree with the approach of Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues. Some think young patients will grow out of their gender dysphoria, or that children should wait until they are 18 to make critical gender decisions. Many would simply like to see data on whether delaying puberty and allowing children to transition at younger ages is safe and healthy for them in the long run.

Olson-Kennedy is hoping to oblige. In 2015, she and three other leading trans youth doctors received the first NIH grant given to study transgender youth. The $5.7 million, five-year study will look at nearly 300 youth, some who received puberty-blocking hormones and others who took masculinizing or feminizing hormones after puberty. Teams at children’s hospitals in L.A., San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago have recruited patients and are now collecting data to evaluate the effect of treatment on mental health and determine how safe the treatments are.

The doctors think the study will prove that early treatment and puberty-blocking lead to far better long-term outcomes, making it easier for doctors and parents to accept that approach.

“It’s an imperfect field with regards to decisions we are asking these families to make,” acknowledged Dr. Robert Garofalo, who co-directs the Center for Gender, Sexuality and HIV Prevention at Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital and is also working on the transgender youth study. Garofalo hopes the team will be able to study patients far beyond the current five-year term to address a host of questions that currently have no answers. Does hormone use in trans youth increase breast cancer risk? How well do adults who have transitioned as teens grapple with their loss of fertility? “These are things that are entirely unknown,” Garofalo said.

And the researchers are hopeful that more data will help to combat misconceptions, both publicly and within the medical profession itself.

Olson-Kennedy points to the stories she hears of pediatricians who say they don’t believe in providing trans care. “You don’t have people opting out of diabetes care because they don’t believe in treating diabetes,” she said.

Insurance companies also prove a roadblock for many of her patients. But with California law making it illegal to deny care for gender dysphoria and with her healthy appetite for a fight, Olson-Kennedy usually gets her way. “I have template letters for 100 different denials,” she said. “I just fax in a 100-page appeal and tell them if they deny me, I’m going to fax in 200 pages.”

The most counterintuitive end goal of such specialized transgender youth clinics may be to eventually not even need them.

“My goal is to make this absolutely mainstream,” said Dr. Cora Breuner, an orthopedist and pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital who chairs the American Association of Pediatrics committee on adolescence. “People should not have to drive 17 hours for this care.” She thinks more kids would get the care they need if pediatricians — usually the first doctor parents seek out — were more comfortable with trans patients. Sensing urgency, the AAP is currently fast-tracking a statement on care for transgender kids, Breuner said.

Many physicians have a long way to go. The Twitter hashtag #transhealthfails chronicles a litany of frustrating experiences, from trans women being forced to take pregnancy tests before X-rays despite their not having uterus, to a doctor saying he couldn’t put a cast on a broken arm because he wasn’t versed in trans health care.

Sixteen-year-old Shay Sullivan, a Montana resident, had a series of frustrating medical experiences before the family found Olson-Kennedy four years ago. For years, the Sullivan family had tried to find care closer to home and dealt with a palpably uncomfortable local pediatrician. All the while, Shay was becoming increasingly anxious. The clock was ticking as puberty approached.

After the family’s first meeting with Olson-Kennedy, Sullivan’s mom, Shelley, said, “We just looked at each other. We were so relieved. We finally found someone who was going to help us find our way.”

The family’s insurance covered all but $200 of the cost of Shay’s $17,000 hormone blocking implant and helped cover the gender confirmation surgery she had at 16. (Most doctors wait until patients are over 18 for such surgery, but Shay was considered exceptionally mature, her mother said.) The family paid for the travel to see Olson-Kennedy and for staying in Arizona for nearly two weeks for the surgery. “We’re fortunate,” said Shelley, a physical therapist. “We both have good jobs and are able to afford it.”

Today, Shay is a driven high school junior, earning an International Baccalaureate degree in high school as well as learning several languages and is planning to study abroad during college. She doesn’t travel as much to the Los Angeles clinic now because her pediatrician has agreed to work with Olson-Kennedy to provide her care. Shay volunteers to help other trans teens in Missoula and is having a “pretty good year socially,” she said. One low point: Since entering high school, she’s not allowed to play on girls’ sports teams.

Doctors on the front lines of transgender youth care say they are heartened that children are coming in at younger ages and that transgender youth clinics are opening in suburban areas. But they’ve also nervously got their eyes on what Trump may do.

“I don’t know if it will be any worse, but I don’t think things will get better,” said Boston Children’s Spack, 73. “I’m old enough to remember when homosexuality was considered a disease. Those ideas die hard.”

Garofalo, a self-described optimist, said he hopes medical care for trans kids won’t suffer greatly under the new administration. But he said, “I’d be naive not to be worried.” He said he is definitely “poised to fight,” if needed, to protect his patients and families.

Olson-Kennedy already has her sleeves rolled up. She’s worried about policy changes, like a dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, that might remove the insurance coverage trans youth need. But she’s also worried about an emerging ethos that may allow open discrimination and violence against transgender youth and adults.

“We’ve made such incredible strides,” she said. “We don’t want to see people going underground again."

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Confirms that it's a psychotic, fascist, eugenic agenda, an all-out attack on humanity, and that includes women, children, and men as well.

[Heaven Swan]

Family Policy Alliance teams up with WoLF (Women's Liberation Front) to confront the Supreme Court

[American Dream]

Abolishing the “Psy”-ence Fictions: Critiquing the Relationship Between the Psychological Sciences and the Prison System, by Colleen Hackett

Tiana is crying. She walks into the room, a large, powerful woman wearing a bland ensemble of a faded green top with similarly colored pants. The silent tears on her face are enough to quiet the many scattered conversations happening among us. Many of us try to make eye contact with Tiana, waiting for her to tell us what is wrong. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t look at anyone. She sits and stares.

We’re all sitting in a classroom in a women’s prison. The space is filled with remedial educational materials for GED students, collages with magazine cutouts of models and vacation getaways, and clichéd motivational posters that inspire the incarcerated to become “ambitious” and “dedicated.” In the moments of silence that follow Tiana’s entrance, I’m reminded of the poster on the wall that lists the amendments to the US Constitution. On this poster the legendary constitutional change, the thirteenth amendment, only includes the part that formally abolishes slavery and does not include the part that says, “Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Every time I encounter suffering in that room, including my own, I remember that sterilized, whitewashed version of history hanging on the wall and cringe. And I rage, quietly.


(Art by Kristen Huizar)


Three other “outsiders” and I co-facilitate a class for survivors of intimate partner violence at a women’s prison. Throughout this essay, I’ll refer to “outsiders” and “insiders”—the chief distinction between the two labels is spatiality and refers to which side of the prison wall one resides on. The outsiders, including myself, are the nonincarcerated facilitators who go to the prison on a weekly basis and have been doing so for about two years. Our small, nonhierarchical collective of outsiders is made up of people who identify as women, artists, mamas, educators, scholars, and/or organizers, and most of us have histories of trauma, abuse, drug and alcohol misuse, or criminalization. The insiders are the incarcerated facilitators and participants who steer the curriculum and lead the popular-education-style classes. The people on the inside of the prison walls have less spatial and social freedoms than the outsiders, and the group makes every attempt possible to close this distance by centering the class’s focal point on the voices, experiences, wisdom, and triumphs of the insiders.

We are based out of a prison in the Rocky West region that houses about a thousand people in various custody levels. As is typical in nearly all US prisons, there is a gross overrepresentation of Black, Brown, Native, and bi/multiracial peoples. This women’s prison, much like other women’s prisons, has a population with extremely high rates of reported and unreported trauma, past and/or ongoing physical and mental abuse, and sexual violence. There are estimations that 65-85 percent of people incarcerated in a women’s jail or prison have histories of abuse compared to 30-45 percent abuse and sexual violence rates among non-incarcerated women.1 Most of the people at this prison are poor. As many as 80 percent of those incarcerated at a women’s prison meet the criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder. Many are mothers and a good majority are single mothers of children under eighteen, which can have devastating consequences for children, especially if they are funneled into the foster system. It is acutely clear that women’s prisons contain a community of people who are at the lowest end of the social and economic strata: those who are considered disposable and expendable, those who have been historically debased by gendered and racialized violence as well as colonial conquest and aggressive neoliberal capitalism, and those who will suffer from the scarlet letter of incarceration. This scarlet letter or “mark” also signals other assumptions about a person to dominant society, branding the punished as inferior (biologically, culturally, or both), tainted, and irredeemable.


(Art by Elliotte Krier)

Social death, a concept most famously applied in describing the psychological effects of slavery in the US, is a consequence of the master’s total control over a slave’s body, labor, and identity.2 The slave becomes wholly dependent upon the master after the social, genealogical, and historical alienation she experiences. In some instances, slaves who have experienced this sudden social death internalize a sense of zero self-worth, and adopt attitudes of blame and hate for the self and others who are like her. Although governmental and prison officials would like to obscure the direct similarities between the social death of slavery and the social death of prison, the parallels are striking. The manifestation of social death in the prison system is the ineligibility to personhood before, during, and after incarceration.3 The very social institutions that claim to safeguard those who are the most “deserving” of protection have failed the women who find themselves in prison. Better-resourced and more-privileged women (oftentimes middle-class white women) benefit from domestic violence state services and the judicial system in ways that others do not. In contrast, the sex workers, the drug users and “addicts,” the poor, the queer, the women of color, and the ones who were shut out of mainstream educational opportunities and legitimate economies are left to fend for themselves. These are the women whose bodies and localities bear signifiers of criminality, as judged by mainstream society and the court system, by being nonwhite and/or residing in disenfranchised and poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The legal system consequently becomes the master that attempts to strip women of their personhood. The criminal legal system sorts out the “real victims” from the “criminals.” That is, women (and men, for that matter) who have simultaneously been harmed and have committed harm are not regarded as people with complex histories but rather as archetypal criminals with no “right” to helping services or freedom from institutionalized violence. Criminalized peoples are the disposable, the unworthy. The insidiousness of this social death process is the extent to which the myths of worthlessness have been absorbed into the stories that the incarcerated tell about themselves.

The outside facilitators bring programming into the women’s facility to, at the very least, mitigate women’s sense of social death. We ideally hope to mobilize prisoners’ resistance to the brutally repressive circumstances in which they find themselves. In doing this, our class explores themes of oppression, power, and patriarchal and white supremacist violence, as well as liberation, resistance, and community organizing. The insiders frequently take the lead in facilitating healing circles in which prisoners voice their personal struggles and share insights and wisdom. Many of the class participants express that the act of articulating their problems helps to bring closure and lessen their pain. In addition to sharing our personal burdens, we also prioritize a politicized curriculum in which participants can connect these burdens to collective struggles. We have found that this process enhances our connectedness and empowers the group to think of ways to oppose and defend against domination. Our group often studies histories of struggle and people’s movements for inspiration and proof that the so-called “power-less” are indeed brimming over with power and vitality. Our approach emphasizes the importance of merging the political and the personal, while honoring the resilience that we each hold. Therefore, we often operate within the messy confines of personal traumas, internalized oppression, and institutionalized violence that can lead to unexpected circumstances in the classroom. For example, our agenda on the next to last class was concerned with an organizing project to address the commissary markups at the facility (for instance, a ten cent bag of ramen sells for fifty cents), and we had not planned on Tiana’s tears and need for support.

In our adoption of an anti-oppression praxis, we prioritize intersectional frameworks. This way of analyzing power is especially necessary for understanding the nuances of domination and how control is exercised through race, class, gender, sexuality, ableism, and citizenship, to name a few. The marriage of anarchism and feminism, particularly queer, women of color, and transnational feminisms, necessitates the dismantling of all oppressive structures. An essential part of this kind of revolutionary project demands that the interconnected structures of patriarchy, transnational capitalism, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and Western imperialism be recognized, as they act differently through and upon people with varied identities. Although traditionally, mainstream feminism has concerned itself with the struggle against gender oppression only and the differences between the “universal” categories of “women” and “men,” a relevant feminist political project understands how other social markers and contexts trouble gender as a singular analytic category. As Sandra Harding points out, “There are no gender relations per se, but only gender relations as constructed by and between classes, races, and cultures.”4 I would add to this list: sexuality, ability, and legal status, which are particularly relevant when talking about incarcerated women. As Patricia Hill Collins has pointed out, these interlocking structures form a matrix of domination—the interconnection of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and so on—that differentially, yet incisively, acts upon people depending upon where they are located in the power structure.5


The writings of Audre Lorde are acutely attuned to the varying ways in which the tools of domination operate on and through people. Lorde, especially in her exacting critiques of status quo (white, heterosexual, “first-world,” class-advantaged) feminist theory, discusses the need to explore the personal as well as the political and never to separate the two.6 Her radical feminist propositions had been preceded by Second Wave mainstream feminism a few years earlier, namely in the old adage of “the personal is political.” That is, the experience of gendered oppression is one that is commonly ignored, laughed about, silenced, or dismissed. Lorde reminds white feminists in particular that their personal experiences cannot properly represent the daily manifestations of racialized and colonial violence that women of color personally experience. She proposes a radical and non-reformist framework through which, by adopting an intersectional politics, mainstream feminists might move away from their personal lives as women who benefit from the “master’s tools [of domination and privilege]” and towards a critical consciousness of multitude, difference, and inclusivity. “Then, the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”7 This illustrates the point that not only should the personal be political, but also that relevant political projects should make room for the “messiness” of our internal lives, and that there are multiple expressions of that “messiness.”

The legacies of trauma, abuse, sexual assault, normalized violence, colonization, racist domination, and class war wreak havoc on our psychologies, to varying extents. There is no doubt that healing needs to happen (if it isn’t already) at the individual and community level while we work to dismantle oppressive structures and ideologies. But so much of the management of that pain and social harm has been outsourced to a specialized professional class of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who constitute an authoritative, unquestioned “psy-complex.”8 Surely there are effective healers and emotional laborers who find themselves entangled in and navigating the contentious terrain of the professional psy-complex. I know several well-intended social workers and therapists, many of them self-declared radicals, who do good work in either their private practice, or at a halfway house for folks with substance-dependence issues, or doing counseling with foster kids. I have no doubt that these individuals are amazingly helpful to the people they work with. It is not my intention to critique these individuals, but rather to turn my critical gaze towards the psy-complex structure that collaborates with governmental institutions and correctional facilities in ways that complement and enforce formalized systems of control.

The prison system in particular has used psychological evaluations and diagnostic categories of pathology as technologies of power for decades, establishing an obscured “psy”-ence fiction of criminality. In a typical psy-ence fiction, the story understands and talks about the individual sans social context; s/he/they lives in a vacuum and personal change is located in the mind of the individual. These psy-ence fictions try to tell us that criminalized people are those who fall victim to their own delusional mentalities and poor choices, instead of contextualizing criminal behaviors as those that are informed by disadvantage, social exclusion, necessity, and/or survival. Therefore, in any fully realized prison abolitionist or radical agenda, the political strategy must confront the more abstract technologies that control, manage, and subordinate populations. The abolitionist agenda, especially one that espouses anti-oppression intersectionalities, should also concern itself with the host of psy-ence fictions that attempt to regulate prisoners’ mental worlds.

Correctional “Treatment” Regimes

Despite the unplanned nature of Tiana’s crisis, the group understood the need to put our organizing on hold, even though we have just two short hours of every week together, per prison policy. Incarcerated women live through so much unimaginable institutionalized and state-sanctioned violence that it would be difficult for an outsider facilitator to truly practice her emancipatory politics without exploring the personal. We ask Tiana if she wants to share or have us support her in some other way. Tiana wants to talk and she launches into a story about how she was degraded by a jealous “boy-girl” (prison slang for genderqueer or transman) on her way back to her cell. At 6 feet 1 inch, Tiana towers over most others at the prison and has learned to use intimidating body language as a defense mechanism. But that didn’t work in this situation. The jealous boy-girl (X) stepped on Tiana’s toes, called her a “stupid slut,” and head-butted Tiana in her face. Tiana told us that she has not felt so degraded in a long time and, although she wanted to physically retaliate, she has two months left before she makes parole, and so she had to swallow her pride and restrain herself.

I’ve heard Tiana’s story. As she puts it, she’s a “rape baby.” She is a biracial white and Black woman who, when growing up, had a lot of n-words thrown her way but was too light-skinned to fit in with the Black kids. She never felt like she fit in until she started rolling with the “big dog” gangsters. She was repeatedly used and abused by men on the outside. Tiana’s personal history of gendered and racialized violence has sometimes left her silent, sometimes angry, and sometimes apathetic. But I’ve been amazed to see her use her powerful presence in our class to lead activities and to regularly talk about oppression and imagine structural alternatives. As Tiana increasingly steps into and owns her worth, she wants to know how she can transform her rage into political action—both on the inside and on the outside, once she’s released.

Tiana continued to explain her story to the group and said that this confrontation set her back. That she was shaking with an overwhelming sense of being unworthy of anything good or righteous or powerful. Tiana walked away from the brief confrontation and tried to go on with her day as normal, and proceeded with her usual routine of going to the medication line. She saw her partner there, D. She didn’t want to tell D about the incident, but word had already gotten around. Things like that usually make the gossip rounds fairly quickly. D asked Tiana what went down and after Tiana finished her story amidst periodic sobbing, X, the person in question, happened to be walking down the sidewalk toward the med line. Before Tiana could say or do anything, D was in a sprint towards X. D beat X down, badly. D was sent to the hole, and X was sent to the infirmary. Tiana is unsure that she’ll see her boo, D, again before she is released.

As Tiana continued with her story, she laid bare her emotional complexities about the issue. She felt guilty. She thought that maybe if she didn’t cry that hard that D would not have rushed to use physical violence against X. She felt sad. She didn’t want to be released without seeing her primary support person again. And, she felt loved. Tiana said that she was so appreciative to have someone do something like that for her. Tiana said she’s never had anyone “defend her honor” before. Most people in her life were too busy stepping on her to offer any kind of care for her. She also knows that D has never before beat anyone down on a lover’s behalf. Tiana said she feels doubly honored that D, out of all people, would perform this kind of care for her in front of so many people.

At this point, I am itching to talk about the problems with lateral violence—violence enacted towards one’s peers rather than towards the oppressors—and about the need to direct our fury towards the power structure and to treat each other with care.

Continues at: https://anarchiststudies.org/2017/01/09 ... n-hackett/

http://monthlyreview.org/2012/11/01/que ... -abolition

Queer Liberation Means Prison Abolition

Victoria Law

Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 240 pages, $27.95, hardcover.

In 1513, en route to Panama, Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa ordered forty Quaraca men to be ripped apart by his hunting dogs. Their offense? Being “dressed as women” and having sexual relations with each other. The homophobia and transphobia behind Balboa’s actions are far from arcane relics of the past, and violence against LGBTQ people continues to this day, both legally sanctioned and in the streets.

In 2008, Duanna Johnson, a black transgender woman, was arrested for a prostitution-related offense in Memphis. At the jail, she was brutally beaten by a police officer. Her beating was caught on videotape, leading to the firing of two officers. Johnson filed a civil suit against the police department but, less than six months later, was found shot in the head a few blocks from her house. This was the third killing of a black transgender woman in Memphis in 2008 alone, and her murder remains unsolved.

Queer (In)Justice examines the violence that LGBTQ people face regularly, from attacks on the street to institutionalized violence from police and prisons. The three authors are long-time advocates and attorneys who work directly with people impacted by incarceration. Joey L. Mogul, a partner at Chicago’s People’s Law Office and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University, has advocated for LGBTQ people ensnared in the criminal legal system. Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney, organizer, and coordinator of Streetwise and Safe, a New York City organization focused on gender, race, sexuality, and poverty-based policing and criminalization of LGBTQ youth of color. Kay Whitlock has worked for almost forty years to build bridges between LGBTQ struggles and movements fighting for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice. Together, they center race, class, and gender/gender nonconformity in analyzing the myriad ways in which LGBTQ people have been policed, prosecuted, and punished from colonial times to the present day.

Criminalizing archetypes of LGBTQ people routinely inform policing, judgment, punishment, responses to violence against queers, and perceptions of queer people in general. These archetypes include: the perception of queers as mentally unstable, the assertion that LGBTQ are constantly trying to “lure” heterosexuals into gender transgression, and the misleading notion that violence is an inherent part of queers’ personality. According to these archetypes, serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Aileen Wuornos killed because they were gay. “Of course,” the authors say, “no such equivalence is suggested in the case of white heterosexual men who kill.” Thus, heterosexual murderers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway are not seen as being driven by an innate, heterosexual murderous nature.

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[Heaven Swan]

Why did you add that long OT post AD?

If you have something to contribute to the discussion you can voice your views but please don't post off topic material with no explanation.

[American Dream]

The article describes Tiana's interactions with a trans inmate in the prison (who may or may not be designated by the state as officially a "woman") and views the various issues around their queer love triangle through a framework of intersectional and anti-state feminism, which has important implications for various issues discussed in this thread.