LGBT – Page 3 – Wis[s]e Words

Ding dong the witch is dead

Published on June 27, 2020Leave a comment

The best thing I saw when I checked Twitter this morning:

Graham -glinner- Linehan suspended from Twitter

We’ve talked about Graham Linehan before. An Irish “comedy” writer who got famous for coasting off the talents of other people on Father Ted, he took criticism to a shitty transphobic joke on The IT Crowd so badly he became a transphobe 24/7. I used to follow him when I first got on Twitter, like I followed a lot of other UK comedy people, but over time his feed became more and more hateful. Just full on hatred for trans people, attempting to sic his followers on anybody who disagreed with him and whinging on how his celebrity friends were deserting him for telling the truth. He lost his friends, his family, his wife and arguably his sanity, but it wasn’t enough to stop his obsession with other people’s genitals. Ultimately he started accusing people of being ‘groomers’ for just talking about trans people. Which was the final straw for Twitter.

A hilarious epilogue followed, as Glinner went crying to Mumsnet, his erstwhile allies in the battle against trans people, only to have the posters there respond like this:

Glinner gets no sympathy on mumsnet

Sorry, who are you and why should I care that you’ve been banned from Twitter? You seem to be a man by the looks of it so why are you posting in the feminism forum? This is a female space.

Never was somebody hoisted on his own petard so beautifully. Thanks, another man. Mumsnet doesn’t need you anymore. On a more serious note, Glinner gone means a huge source of harassment against trans people and their defenders is now gone. There isn’t really anybody with the same sort of reach and audience as him. It once again shows how important no platforming is as a strategy to fight against bigots and nazis.

“Get over it and go pee”

Published on June 20, 2020Leave a comment

Alison Bechdel already knew the score in 1995:

Dykes to Watch Out For comic from 1995 on transphobia

The titular Dykes to Watch Out Fo are walking out of a bad movie, when Jillian has to pee. Mo, who has to do the same, doesn’t want to enter the loo because Jillian, though cool, is a trans woman. Lois tells her off, saying she’s not going to wait around all night just because Mo has a transphobia attack. So Mo enters the toilets, only to be challenged by a woman on whether she is in the right bathroom. (Mo looks rather butch after all.) Jillian defends her, telling the stranger to take a closer look. After this, Mo thanks Jillian and says she would do the same for her. This is however no longer necessary now her “nobody knows I’m a transsexual” t-shirt has worn out.

So there you have it, the absurdity of the bathroom panic laid bare in a twentyfive year old comic. Trans women are no danger, the idea that you can tell who is and is not a woman at a glance is deeply homophobic and barring people from pissing in the toilets they feel most comfortable in is ludicrous.

Bruce Springsteen: queer icon

Published on June 10, 2020Leave a comment

I can see it.

Cover of Born in the USA with the Springsteen butt

More seriously, Naomi Gordon-Loebl in the Nation:

Which raises a difficult question: What exactly is so queer about Springsteen? Is it his extreme butchness, so practiced and so precise that he might as well have learned it from the oldest lesbian at a gay bar? Is it because his hard-earned, roughly hewn version of love is recognizable to those of us for whom desire has often meant sacrifice? Or is it something simpler? Do many queers love Springsteen because nearly every song he has produced in his 50-year career reflects a crushing, unabiding sense of alienation and longing—and what could be more queer than that?

The story of Bruce Springsteen is well known. Two albums that made him and the E-Street Band Jersey stars, a breakthrough album after the band got tweaked a bit with Born to Run, crowned the future of rock and roll, then fucked over by his first manager and forbidden from recording for a few years. The band spent the three years between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town touring, honing their craft. Once they re-emerged, older and more cynical, most of Bruce’s original optimism had disappeared.

It’s that backstory that makes his music so much more grounded than many of his rock contemporaries. His songs don’t offer fantasies, though they can offer hope. His most famous hit sounds so much like a patriotic anthem Ronald Reagan wanted it as a campaign song, but is actually a seering indictment of the realities of his “Morning in America”. Even at his most insufferable, on Human Touch/Lucky Town he still can’t quite forget his working class roots. He walks the walk too: doing fund raisers for the Democrats, tours for Amnesty International and the like. He has spoken out against police violence and for Black Lives Matter and of course wrote the above song about the murder of Amadou Diallo. He isn’t perfect, but his heart is in the right place.

I became a fan when I was ten, eleven. One of the first albums of his I owned, was the live boxset he brought out in 1985, a compilation of ten years of touring. That was at the height of his popularity, deep in the dark heart of Reagan America and what’s on it? Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, Edwin Starr’s “War”, a warning that “because in 1985, blind faith in your leaders, or in anyone can get you killed”. He’s deeply subversive on a level I didn’t understand then, but unconsciously seeped into me.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl argues that the pain he puts in his songs is what makes him resonate with queer people like her. Not being queer myself I can’t judge, but to me he is the lightning example of how to be butch, how to be masculine without being macho. It’s a masculinity that is available to anybody who feels attracted to it, not reserved just for cis men. It’s part of what keeps me coming back to Bruce Springsteen again and again too.

Historical queerness

Published on September 15, 2019Leave a comment

When the socalled “lovers of Modena” turned to both have male teeth immediately alternate explenations were sought for why they were holding hands:

Some of the suggestions for the link between the two skeletons are that they are siblings, cousins or soldiers who died together in battle, study author Federico Lugli told Italy’s Rai news site

Because what we can blithly assert for a presumed straight skeleton couple, we apparantly cannot do for one that looks a bit gay. As James Lórien MacDonald put it on Twitter in a thread explaining why putting modern labels on ancient relationships is a bit dodgy:

So. It was assumed that these people had been lovers because they were holding hands, and that they were male and female because they were assumed to be lovers. Perhaps there are other reasons to be buried holding hands, and maybe we’ll learn more about those relationships.

Again, this is something we do without thinking when it comes to what we assume are straight couples. None of that “well, they might be cousins” namby-pambyness then. Of course other civilisations had different ideas about sexuality and gender than our own, but if this is only an objection when it comes to queer people it all feels rather hypocritical. Personally I don’t see the harm in claiming these skeletons for the gay camp when the opposite happens daily without anybody noticing or complaining. The specialists can argue over what those two skeletons really were.

Lily in parliament!

Published on May 3, 2019Leave a comment

In events bizarre even for 2019, we’ve had what is possibly the first depiction of an anime character shown in the UK parliament and it was everybody’s favourite trans zombie Lily!

Joanna Cherry holding up a poster of Lily saying shut the fuck up terf

Unfortunately it was transphobe/terf defender Joanna Cherry who held up that poster of Lily, not as a rare example of anime getting a trans character right, but in an attempt to prove this particular picture was a death threat and the very word TERF was a slur on women. Which it isn’t of course, but you may ask yourself, well, how did we get there?

Lily says: shut the fuck up TERF

It all started with SonicFox, professional gamer, gay black furry and trans ally, tweeting a short video of him playing Mortal Kombat 11 and applying a fatality on Sonya Blade while shouting “die TERF”. Sonya Blade’s voice actor being one Ronda Rousey, ex-wrestler and still transphobe, not to mention a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. A nasty piece of shit in other words, with Sonic Fox letting off some steam there. He posted it to his Twitter and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for Helen Lewis.

Helen Lewis is one of the Grauniad/New Statesman stable of pet transphobes, also including Germaine Greer, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel. These are all career media “feminists”, largely left irrelevant as times moved on, who have found new relevance by becoming transphobes. In the process intentionally or accidentaly providing cover for American right wingers to expand to the UK. Lewis found Sonic Fox’ tweet, immediately did her “I want to speak to your manager” schtick and demanded he recanted. Which he didn’t of course. He just found this whole thing hilarious, a bunch of white, middle aged, English TERFs demanding he stop mocking them.

Which started the usual TERF brigading, where they rope in all their followers to mass report, mass harass somebody to get their account suspended or them fleeing from Twitter. They ultimately got their victory by getting Sonc Fox suspended for a couple of hours and forcing him to delete his tweet. In the process Lewis got the usual sort of meme responses from people annoyed by her transphobia, several of which featured this picture of Lily, holding a badly photoshopped in gun, saying “shut the fuck up TERF”. And it’s one of these tweets that Joanna Cherry cited in a Human Rights Committee Q&A session in the British parliament. And she lied about it. She said it said shut the fuck up, cunt when it really said, as is clearly visible in the video, “shut the fuck up, terf”. And terf is not a slur, not an insult.

So first she lied about terf being a slur, when it in fact was coined by trans exclusionary radical feminists as a neutral description of themselves, then she lied about the actual “slur” on the image. It’s not the only time she lies. She talks about Sonic Fox’s original video as if it’s actual violence against actual women instead of him playing a video game death scene. (Incidently, terfs on twitter are currently busy slandering him by claiming all instances in which he playing a male character in Mortal Kombat hitting a female character are examples of misogynistic violence…) She also pretends that the person supposedly targeted by Sonic Fox and others is some ordinary woman rather than the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Three lies found with just a cursory glance at the video.

So why is a member of parliament trying to gin up non-existing problems of non-violence against not actually women, but video game characters, but completely ignoring actually existing violence against actually existing women, against trans women? Is Cherry a transphobe herself or just an useful idiot?

At least the creator of the picture could laugh at all this.