female to muscle selfie female to mentioning trans women of color female to menstruation for ts female to miserable around cis men but not the good queer ones whose desires you can project yourself into female to machiavellian identity politics female to mansplain
female to mote surrounding a glass castle of emotion
female to mediocre rap career (ft. female to macklemore)
female to men’s rights activist
female to make up is only ever transgressive on me
female to Morrissey clone
female to maybe I can pull off a chinstrap
female to masturbation scientist
female to minor internet celebrity with dwindling social capital but some $weet speaking gigs
in the past few months, i have been approached several times
to provide various forms of support and intervention to or around young trans
women who are feeling suicidal. this has
happened in a few different capacities, both personal and professional. of course, the professional gets pretty
personal sometimes when one is a member of the population that one is “working
with” in a social service role. in all
of these situations, i’ve noticed a recurrent theme articulated by both the
suicidal individual and some of the communities surrounding them that’s
frightened and disturbed me: the idea of suicide as an act of personal agency
that should be upheld and supported by “the community.”
as in, if a trans girl wants to kill herself, and she’s
thought it through, and she says she sees no other option, and that this is
what she had decided, then we should not intervene in any way. and if she asks for help in making her
suicide plan more effective, less painful, or aesthetically pleasing, then we
should provide that help.
i am not exaggerating.
my understanding is that there are a few different threads
of “radical politics” that get drawn into this perspective, which did not, clearly, develop in a vacuum: consent culture
and the politics of body sovereignty is the most obvious. people have the right to do what they want
with their own bodies and health decisions, including self-harm and ending their
lives. if they do not consent to
life-preserving intervention, the community does not have the right to
interfere.
woven into this is a certain strand of mad pride and
anti-ableist thinking (which itself highlights some issues with conflating all types
of mental health struggle/illness/dis-ease with disability in general) that
critique the power dynamics involved with enforcing saneist, rationalist,
and/or institutional perspectives that living is better than death on folks who
are suicidal.
and there is also a broader critique of suicide intervention
philosophy/practice as a victim-blaming manifestation of a society that constantly
attacks and degrades trans women (and all marginalized people to various
degrees) and then medicalizes/shames/further violates them for suicidality. in this vein, suicidality is a natural,
understandable, and even politically powerful response in the face of a society
that transforms life into a degradation.
the last argument is the one that i am the most viscerally
affected by, and a few years ago, i went so far as to write and publish an
article expanding on this perspective and arguing that the community (or rather, society in general) is
responsible for driving individuals to suicide, refusing to offer them adequate
support, and then blaming them for their deaths.
although i still stand by that article, and the sentiment
that suicide is a politically charged, understandable reaction to suffering - both political and personal – i am now
deeply uncertain about the responsibility of having published such a thing in a
climate in which suicide among trans women and queer folks more broadly is an
epidemic that continues to haunt us.
there is not a single queer or trans youth i have worked with who has
not considered suicide at some point, and the majority have actually planned
suicides or attempted them.
i am uncertain – i have regret – because i think underlying all of the
apparently political arguments for supporting the suicides of trans women are
powerful aesthetic and emotional undercurrents that reflect our (queer, trans,
racialized) communities’ trauma histories and deep ambivalence toward
relationship building and care. in other
words, i think that this idea that we need to support trans women’s decisions
to die – in other words, let them die
– comes from the ways we understand and feel about love.
the argument around body sovereignty and consent is, to me,
clearly rooted in a mis-conceptualization of what it means to provide care (the
action of giving help) and caring (the feeling of being cared about). both body sovereignty and consent politics
come, after all, from movements around medical care and sexual/romantic
intimacy.
the predominant (white, colonial) queer/trans narrative of “proper”
consent to being cared for goes something like this: someone expresses that
they are in pain, or you happen to see that they are. you offer them help. if they refuse, you back off, no questions
asked. any further attempt to help could
be a considered a violation.
this narrative holds a lot of resonance for me, but i
believe it comes from a traumatized place: it is rooted in queer and trans
experiences of abusive families and intimate partnership in which we are not
allowed to refuse, we are not allowed to leave.
our reaction is to swing the other way in the extreme: we encourage
people to leave, we don’t question the refusal of love, even when it is clearly
needed.
as a social worker/psychotherapist in training, i was pretty
self-righteous and very vocal about enforcing this model of consent/care among
my peers. it broke down when i started
to work as a family therapist in a totally non-queer psychiatric hospital
setting (the antithesis of anarchist queer community settings).
in my work with families, i often met very young children (as
young as 4 years old) who were extremely angry and emotionally dysregulated due
to trauma or other stressors. i mean, so
angry that they would damage furniture and physically/sexually harm their peers.
these children frequently expressed hatred for themselves, as well as the
desire to die. in therapy sessions, they
often told their parents that they were going to “run away forever.”
more often than not, these parents were concerned and loving
but did not know how to respond. they asked me what they should say. from my own place of both clinical training
and queer narratives, i suggested that they tell their children that it was
okay to be angry, that they were allowed to be angry, and that if they did
indeed run away, that they would always have a home to come back to if they
wanted. i believed that this was
consent, was the secure attachment that is so prized in child psychology.
my supervisor (therapist instructor) agreed with my
intervention, but also suggested that i had missed an important element: i
should also tell these parents to say that if their child ran away, they would
go out and find them and bring them home.
the emotional effect this had on me was profound. this was not something i had been taught to
believe in queer community – that love and care might mean following someone
even after they have rejected you. that
it might mean reaching out, and failing, and then reaching out and failing,
again and again.
that abandonment and rejection by a person in pain – child
or adult – might be way of finding out just how hard someone is going to work
to help you not just stay alive, but change your life for the better.
this is where the anti-ableist facet of the “support suicide”
argument breaks down as well – it may be ableist to dismiss someone’s rationale
for dying, but it is equally ableist to expect that everyone in a crisis of
pain will express or even know their needs in a perfectly linear, logical
sense. it is ableist to assume that simply
asking for consent to intervene once or even twice is sufficient to determine
whether or not someone might not want or need help.
and on the level of considering trans women’s suicide within
a transmisogynist social system, i do not believe that “supporting the agency
of suicide” is actually a legitimate refutation of that social system. rather, it is the ultimate expression of
disposability culture. it allows us to
disguise inaction in the face of mass suffering and death with a pretense of
compassion and radicality. it is not
radical to “support” trans women in dying when we are already being murdered
regularly. it is not revolutionary to
simply accept that society is so terrible that trans girls might as well kill
ourselves.
we are the society that surrounds trans girls and sends them
the messages about whether or not life might be worth living after all. it is our responsibility to change the
stakes, to offer different options, to keep reaching out and sending the
message that we will never stop trying, never stop caring, never stop loving.
if a trans girl decides to die, that is her decision and i will
not shame or pathologize it. but there
is big fucking difference between not shaming or pathologizing a suicide and
being complicit in it.
and the truth is, given even the slightest chance of
something changing for the better, i think that most of us would choose to live.
I met Adrienne Rich once. She was speaking at a fundraiser, where I was working guest reception, and the whole thing was kind of boring for the most part. I do not remember what she said. At that time – and this was almost five years ago – she was quite frail and very much in failing health.
She reminded me of most of the women I met at the CLAGS conference on Lesbians in the 70s last year. That weekend was frustrating for about a million reasons, the most palpable of which was the seeming difficulty in overcoming the intergenerational divide between the young(ish) queer academic set, and women who had lived through the 70s and were there to find community with each other, to share their work, and to remember. This lead to all kinds of unfortunate clashes, but that is a story for another time.
These women – whom my generation, for better or for worse, has (often derisively) labelled “The Second Wave” of feminism – talked a lot about their lives that weekend. The internet is a weird place. People throw up their ideas on the screen, and they are these little scratches of meaning, argument, rhetoric, and while that certainly carries a kind of power, there is another kind of power in being in a room with someone, and experiencing their words, their language embodied, their visible affects, the way they interact (or don’t interact) with other people, and the amalgam of what happens as part of all that.
To break it down really simple: lesbians in the 70s had it hard, and they still have it hard. The women that I met, they were on food stamps then, and they’re still on food stamps now. They were marginally employed then, trying to make art and change that no one understood, and that gets laughed at now. Their old cars break down all the time and there is never any money to get them fixed and they can’t just bike around like they used to. All their spaces are gone: their bookstores, their cafes, their activist centers. They do not recognize what we call feminism as anything like the feminism they know and that has meant to so much to them; and, perhaps not surprisingly, they find our theory and our praxis highly suspect. They all have breast cancer. Some of them have had it a couple times.
Oppression creates fear, and thus, a politics of fear. I have been thinking some about that since Rich’s death. There is something emotional that is catching for me: did she know, did she really know, how damaging her collusion on this work would be to generations of low-income trans people to come? How much deep suffering and heartache it would cause? How it would bestow on us a whole new set of knives to rip each other up with?
When I see people posting reverently about Adrienne Rich in the past couple days, it inspires this panic response in me. You are not my friend. You do not have my back. I knew it. I knew you would bail all along, and that I could never trust you, and here you are, showing your true colors. We are not on the same team. We never were. It is always a lie. Fuck you.
I end up feeling this way kind of a lot.
My internet contacts cut a pretty wide swath through a couple different queer communities, and something like this always reminds me of how we are so different, and how difference is this gulf between people that can never be totally filled and only shakily bridged, and how all this factors into a fundamental impossibility of communication. It is a bummer.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the people I know who are posting about Adrienne Rich break down into two camps: 1) people who love trans women and are like, “uh, hey guys…” and 2) people who do not seem to care a whole lot about us, who post uncritical gush (like I mean you would think Whitney up and died all over again.) And certainly, though no one is necessarily obliged to care about trans women I guess, it all just makes me feel more isolated, more alone, more ostracized, more of a pariah, more shame, which are feelings I spend a lot of time feeling anyway.
I don’t remember what Adrienne Rich said that night, but it’s on the internet. However, so is a speech that this lady gave, that same night. She basically burned down the roof of the place. I will tell you, old radicals are my favorite radicals. I know it’s easy to hate on newly fired-up, barely post-adolescent revolutionaries (#occupy), but it really renews your faith to meet people who have spent a lifetime busting ass and busting heads and have won a few rounds with The Man. You can really learn a thing or two from these folks sometimes.
Do yourself a favor and watch that clip all the way through! It is 8 minutes long which is like a lifetime in YouTube time, and the sound is patchy, but it’s worth it. If you can’t manage that, Tumblr generation, let me quote, for instance, some of her concluding remarks:
I wanna tell you, your life will be made sweet by comrades and friends. And it doesn’t come naturally. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. It takes chicken soup with matzoh balls when they’re sick. It takes a card or a call on a birthday. It takes lending them money when they don’t have it. It takes a lot of work to build friendship with the people with whom you struggle, but when you do, you get back twenty times what you invest.
We need to get enough sleep. None of us should smoke! We have a very important job to do and we need to stay alive and be healthy, and we have to help every one of our comrades to do the same, because when we do, our lives will be made sweet, and because I do, I am truly blessed.
Figuring out how to live together is hard. To exist in community with people who constantly piss you off is exhausting, but ultimately: worth it. As Ms. Goldin says, it is sweet. But in between, there are these things that set our teeth on edge about each other, and we start smiling the kind of smiles that are about baring teeth to each other. We don’t let it show that it stings, or we shrug it off like it’s no big deal, and we keep a running catalog of hurts in our head and a dossier of every aesthetic political statement everyone we know has ever made in public and index it against our own internal emotional safety actuarial matrices. And sometimes, if we trust you, we send you a text, or give you a call, or whisper to you at a party, or point blank bring it up while we’re making you lunch: “Hey. Did you know you hurt me? Can we talk about that? I think I trust you enough to be vulnerable enough to tell you about this, even though it’s going to make me seem like an oversensitive bitch.” I suppose that’s just how you get through, with other people, because the only way to get through is with other people.
These are the things we have learned to do We who live in troubled regions.
BOTTOM LINE, IF PEOPLE DON’T SAY WHAT THEY BELIEVE, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS GET LOST. IF THEY ARE LOST OFTEN ENOUGH, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS NEVER RETURN.
— David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (via temporarilyeuropean)
I’m assuming most of the people replying here are quite young as they seem unaware of the history behind LGBT+ leather subculture in the 80s and earlier.
To clear up a few things:
“Doing whippets” refers to poppers, a common recreational drug containing amyl nitrite. Poppers were often used by gay and bi men in the 70s and 80s due to their ability to relaxed the smooth muscles in the sphincter, leading to an easier time during anal sex. They fell out of fashion during the AIDs crisis due to their link in causing a rare form of cancer in HIV+ men. Source: (x)
“Daddy” used as gay slang here refers to the older father figure in the community who would guide newer folks in the gay dating scene. These types helping younger gay men with their feelings (especially those stemming from a lack of a father figure, paternal abuse, homophobia) and so on.This is different from sugar daddy or daddy dom/little girl dynamics, but the terminology and its usage was appropriated from gay culture and conflated with it. Sources: (x) (x)
Leather subculture itself was directly from gay bikers post-WWII as a counter-culture to the idea of the stereotypical camp gay man. It relied heavily on military protocols and their clothing was specifically worn to uphold an idea of heavily masculine Marlon-Brando Hollister riot -esque feel. I highly suggest reading about it. Sources: (x) (x)
It was in maybe the late 90s/early 00s at the earliest that I started seeing a shift in people conflating leathermen/leatherd*kes with mainstream BDSM (which included straight people). Before then it was strictly a LGBT+ thing, as much as being a bear was (hence the reason pride flags for it were made in the 80s) Leathermen and leatherd*kes had their own specific culture and protocols which the straight BDSM subculture felt entitled to. Nowadays having a ‘daddy’ fetish no longer means being a young gay guy in the scene who’s looking for an older, father figure type guy to guide him. Now it’s conflated with ageplay and straight sugar daddies.
TL;DR: Long story short, straight kinksters stole terminology from LGBT+ culture and misused it to the point where everyone thinks kinksters at pride are just “straights who think having kinky sex makes them queer” rather than knowing how the entire culture started with LGBT+ folks in the first place, and straight people just happened to appropriate it all.
Iev been meaning to come back to this post because i am S H R I E K I N G over how fucking bad it is on every level, and i am amazed at the traction it has gotten on mogai tumblr.
1.) whippets are nitrous oxide. nobody who uses poppers has ever referred to them as whippets. what the fuck. also, they never “fell out of fashion” (not that you’d have any idea you sexless loser), nor were they linked to cancer. the “rare form of cancer” you’re referring to is kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic infection in people with AIDS. poppers were demonized, just like everything having to do with gay sex was demonized.
2.) “daddy” is a hot older dude what the fuck. that’s it. a daddy is not “a community father figure guiding young gay men in the dating scene,” he’s a hot older dude. the idea that daddies were spirtual-sexual gurus until straight people “appropriated” the idea and “conflated” it with sugar daddies is LAUGHABLE. as long as gay men have existed, trade has existed. ever heard of a “house boy” (no you havent)? “helping younger gay men with their feelings” this is a really weird way of saying “fucking their tight buttholes bareback” lmao
3.) yeah, thats actually accurate about the leather scene.
anyway, fuck this post. i can’t believe the mogais managed to romanticize leather daddies of all people as “pure queer expressions of queer power and love.” sometimes a big-dick daddy in a leather harness is just a dude trying to fuck holy shitttt
I mean sometimes Daddys are cool and take an interest in boys as people and are good to them as Community Elders (or like, even give them the time of day after they get laid) but ??? ???Men ??? Men are just less likely to do that?????
Anyway @sobercommunist have you ever read Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen? It’s a really good ethnography of gay dude subcultures, all three of which get romanticized and commodified by kids these days, in my experience.
21 WHITE FTM NYC, LEO ENFP H8R PSUEDOQUEER
