You're so "Radical", you probably don't think this post is about you

image is from here

If you go to the blog where I found the above image, you'll see but one way the term "radical" is misused socially, in this case by a Christian who thinks preaching about Christianity is "radical", not what it actually is as practiced by most who call themselves "Christian": anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Indigenous, racist, anti-queer, and patriarchal too. To my friends who are Christian: you are exceptions to a rule, in my experience. And when you are the rule, not the exception, I'll believe Christianity means something other than what I have experienced it meaning and doing on Earth, which is creating great genocidal and gynocidal harm to many people. But this post is not about Christianity and that religion is one I wish to discuss here. (I've discussed it enough for one lifetime.) What I wish to discuss in this post is how the term "radical" is used or misused, depending on what you believe it means.

Increasingly, across the web and off the web on the ground, there are people who call themselves "radical" in one way or another. You know who you are.

Among that population, are people who are not engaged in any anti-status quo activism of any form, in any organised way. They are, simply, calling themselves "radical". I will note immediately that I include interpersonal and individual work as potentially radical work, but that when I speak of "revolutionary" work, it includes organised resistance, with other people with a similar or collaborative or coalition-built goal of dismantling or radically transforming institutions, systems, and structures of oppression--all of that.

I live in an overtly individualistic society--when it comes to on-going organised resistance and activism determined to radically transform society into one less ecocidal, gynocidal, and genocidal. I live in a country that makes sure slaves can be "employed", that poor and working people can be laid off, get time-limited support while unemployed, while massive corporations get corporate welfare year after year after year. I suppose you know by now that for the first time ever, 1% of the U.S. population is in possession of a whopping 25% of all money made in the U.S. or by U.S.ers. And over 50% of all wealth is possessed by the top 5%. Now, given how inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and other taxes work for the rich, this means that wealth is increasingly hoarded because the U.S. government, allegedly elected by THE PEOPLE--including the poor and the working class and the middle class, because lobbyists in Washington are cozy with elected officials who don't, in any meaningful way, shape, or form, represent the poor, the working class, or the middle class.

Add to that the function of white supremacy and male supremacy in the U.S. and how crimes against poor people of color are not regarded as such--for example the incarceration of poor Black and Brown people, white white rich criminals roam the streets and rule the boardrooms. And how the poorest U.S. Americans with the greatest work burdens are women of color. And how women of color internationally do most of the world's hard labor. And how white men can travel internationally to rape and purchase human beings of color in order to repeatedly rape them, as they wish, with no consequence. And how white het men profit by producing material that depicts the rape of trafficked women and girls, and that material is protected as their speech, and is not seen as a human rights violation of the classes of people so raped and trafficked.

And how men's rape, beating, selling, and murder of women in intimate relationship to the men is not opposed by men, except by a few voices, most of them not organised to do anything at all about stopping rape, beating, selling, and murdering of women. Some of these men are fathers, some are boyfriends, some are husbands. Some are other relatives of the girls and women. In the U.S. only wealthy people can buy and sell other human beings and if you're paying attention, that means white men, generally and usually.

Along with all of that, the media will not report on any of this in any accurate, honest, truthful, or sustained way, with any radical perspective at all. This means, essentially, the mass media owned by the rich will not tell the rest of us about it as a social-economic-political problem, and as a human rights violation issue. Liberal to Conservative viewpoints dominate the airwaves which in no way threatens the people with the most power, who own the media and basically controls U.S. citizens know. It could report the truth and encourage organised activism, but it doesn't because that's not in the interests of the major corporations, the wealthiest U.S. Americans, or the shareholders of those companies.

Amidst this crisis--which is very much an on-going and rather desperate crisis for the poor and working people. Most of us in the U.S. cannot afford health coverage or care or medicines needed for the conditions like depression and anxiety and the diseases caused by diets coercively fed to us through advertising media. Just note how many times a day you see commercials for processed foods, for foods with sugar and other simple carbohydrates which create diabetes and heart disease. We are being bombarded with messages that we must eat sugar and also lose weight--and the corporate (advertising, entertainment, and "news") media owners don't call this mind-fucking the masses. We are encouraged to not take good care of ourselves as the rich get richer, as men continue to rape, beat, sell, and murder women and girls, and as the poor are tossed into prisons across the country for "crimes" that the same percent of whites and rich people will never serve time in jail for, or be charged with, or be pulled over by cops to be questioned and harassed.

Why is it, then, that feminists, anarchists, LGBTIA (I = intergender, A = asexual) activists, anti-racism activists, Indigenist activists, and environmental and anti-nuclear activists, peace and anti-war activists, and economic justice activists aren't all working together to stop these atrocities against most people, animals, the sky, the water, and the earth?

There are many plausible explanations: that dominant LGBTIA groups with media access don't really do much for anyone other than white folks, middle class and rich folks, and only those L and G and B and T folks who adhere to conservative to liberal ideas about what it even means to be Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Trans. And some of those people, along with many heterosexuals, call themselves "sex radicals". And by "sex radical" they mean being pro-prostitution (trafficking and rape of girls and women), pro-pornography (depicting and selling images and videos of the trafficking and rape of girls and women), pro-BDSM (people who sexualise domination and submission in elaborately violent ways). There's that. And there's the virulent misogyny and racism, including pro-slavery racism, and Indigenous-exploiting racism, of "radical" environmental activists. And there's the fact that if activists are Brown, Black, Asian. Arab, and/or Indigenous, they cannot get media time on any U.S. corporate media to discuss the issues, the fear, the desperation, the troubles being faced by most U.S. Americans and by people worldwide.

We have organisations that exist to assist very marginalised populations of people, like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Audre Lorde Project. But how much funding do they get from the rich? Not much.

There are various feminist groups, most of which adhere to liberal understandings of feminist activism, and actively won't support radical to revolutionary feminists or feminist campaigns, such as those to hold corporate rapists and traffickers accountable for the human and civil rights violations they commit. So there's that.

What I'm trying to get at here, is that most folks who call themselves "radical" aren't doing jack shit about C.R.A.P. And there's one more category of people misusing the word "radical" that I'll mention: people online, who blog, who call trans people bigoted, mean, and insulting names, who call women bigoted, mean, and otherwise misogynist names, who call people of color racist names, who call lesbian, gay, and bi folks homophobic names.

My question to all of you is this: How do you justify calling that behavior "radical" or "pro-revolutionary"? I'm sure many of you DO justify it, in various ways. But I just want to remind y'all that treating other human beings like shit online, on your blogs, and making fun of oppressed people, and bullying oppressed people, and harassing oppressed people, is neither "radical" or "revolutionary". Those, I'd argue, are among The Master's Tools that won't do jack shit to liberate any of us but will help ensure the collective oppressed "we" is not able to organise with one another at all, because we won't feel safe to engage with each other, because so much hate and vile commentary is being spewed by some of us against others of us.

And, bloggers, please, if you're going to call yourselves "radical", make it a point to also be organising in revolutionary, anti-status quo coalititions to stop (once and for all) CRAP from religiously dominating, raping, beating, murdering, poisoning, bombing, terrorising, and otherwise destroying the most vulnerable among us. To pick up a point made by Derrick Jensen and others, you'll note that I'm not declaring various actions against the most oppressive among us--the rich white men--to be anti-radical or anti-revolutionary. Even if those actions are considered--and they will be considered--mean, bullying, harassment, or threatening to the most powerful, poverty-promoting, war-adoring, pollution-supporting, rape-protecting, genocide-committing and otherwise violent people on Earth.

I'm asking anyone who identifies as radical who is actively and enthusiastically promoting meanness toward oppressed people, or the bullying, harassment, domination, abuse, violation, slavery, trafficking of oppressed people intepersonally, regionally, or internationally, racism, heterosexism, and misogyny, as well as genocide and ecocide, to please stop using that term in your self-description or in describing the work you are doing. And, where and whenever possible, please organise in systematic and collectivist ways with other oppressed people--who are most of us, after all--to compost C.R.A.P. before it destroys everyone and everything, taking out the most vulnerable first, or making them do the most unhealthy and humiliating work while we all collectively die.

Because just surviving and finding ways to keep people alive in systems which seek the destruction of most of us isn't enough to make one's actions radical or revolutionary in the collectivist sense, even while I do firmly believe genuine self-care by and for those of us who are oppressed is an act of radical love and ought to be practiced daily, if possible. And, speaking from experience, I know full well that's not always possible. But for those of us who have the energy and the time, let's continue working together, rather than tearing at each other's flesh, demolish each other's psyches, and crush each other's souls, metaphorically, verbally, and in so many other ways. There's nothing radical going on when we do that, if radical means engaged in collectivist, humane, liberatory action. And the Masters sure know it.

"A Political Hierarchy in Gender Binary Drag", or When is a binary not a binary? When we're talking about a gendered, raced, sexed, classed HIERARCHY

this graphic is from here at veganarchist.com

NOTE: revised and added to on 25 Jan. 2011 ECD. (See the third and fourth paragraph from the end of the post going up, not from the beginning of the post. I write there about gender dysphoria a bit.)

For me, this is THE critical question that is responsible for two distinct realities in the white het male dominated West:

--radical feminism as presented by some cisgender women--including the work of radical white women and radical women of color, and

--cis queer politics including the description of trans identities as presented by some transsexual people, but not by many trans- and inter-gender people.

I have yet to hear what's radical about the contemporary liberal queer/transsexual understanding of gender. Can someone please tell me who benefits from rendering "gender" apolitical? Since when is political oppression only "social options"?

For me, first of all, we have the same phenomenon, albeit from a white class-privileged location socially. I never felt "like a boy" as boys around me most often behaved; I rejected a lot of what 'being a man' had to offer me, while of course soaking up a lot of privileges--they come with the location, I realised, not the identity. Men like John Stoltenberg and Robert Jensen seem to make a case for rejecting manhood on the interpersonal/behavioral level, which I think denies the harshest truth--womanhood and manhood are not embedded primarily in our identities; they are embedded in systems, institutions, structures, locations, positions. None of which go anywhere if we shift our individual identities.

This is my view: racist patriarchy can do very well, thank you, with queer folks in it, with trans folks in it, because it's not the binary it most needs to hold onto; it's male supremacy. And male supremacy thrives in queer/trans community. As does misogyny.

The trick--and I do feel it's a nasty trick--of uber-WHM supremacist academy's post-modernist and post-structural perspectives (we can note the view that there's some sense of getting beyond structural reality in the very term), is that the "problem" is "the gender binary" always worded exactly that way. The irony of post-structuralism being used to maintain oppressive structures seems lost on many in the Academy. PoMo is Mo in PoMo clothing.

"The gender binary". The gender binary? Gender has been many things across cultures, but it being a "binary" isn't really the issue. In patriarchal societies, especially white ones and white-colonised ones, gender is a socially enforced hierarchy--regardless of how many there are. That is the issue. So if we don't deflect from the "hierarchy" by calling it a "binary", we end up having to directly face a very misogynistic system that can find places for male women and female men; for any permutation and combination of femininity and masculinity, as long as feminine always means "less than" masculine, and masculine always means "power over" the feminine.

"Cowboys and Indians" isn't a binary. Nor is Nazi/Jew. Nor is Black/white. Nor, in my view, is man/woman. Those are hierarchies--in the first case a game white children played around me as if it were a binary--that's the trick: to make it appear to be "us vs. them" as if there's some sort of level playing field. As if the Indians could win one day; the cowboys the next. Meanwhile, the actual genocide of American Indians and the existence of cowboy culture across the mid and southwest is what? Not relevant? Not real? Interferes with the fun of the game? This is my issue with queer drag: to turn a condition requiring great violence into a fun time without noting that it is, to the core, violence--directed against women and girls--is to be terribly disrespectful to those who pay the highest price for 'behaving like women'.

When I bring this concern, this critique to pro-feminist queer folks, they say, "we just wanna have fun". That's privilege--to be able to have fun with the reprehensible terroristic destruction of a class of people. Shall we have a game of Nazi-Jew also? How about White Master-Black slave? Oh, wait: we do that too. Those are called "genres" in pornography, which people consume as pleasure.  They are also the role-play games some people act out for fun. To better understand what's oppressive about that, I recommend reading Audre Lorde's contribution to Against Sadomasochism. To reduce a sadist or a slaver to being "just a role I play" is to be utterly insensitive to those who are experiencing denigration, humiliation, and possession by very unfun sadists and slavers.

To turn a hierarchy into a binary is a pretty fiendish thing to do, if one's people are being destroyed by the hierarchy in binary's clothing.

Social hierarchies are political systems of grossly cruel power exercised in every way through every method, to keep women and girls down relative to men and boys; to keep Black and Brown people down; to keep American Indians on the "endangered species list". It'd be like saying "hunter and lion" is a binary. Huh??

The white/het/cis/male supremacist hierarchy will keep trans folks out if they're seen as "a bunch of queers" (whether or not they are) because "queers" are seen as doing one of two things, neither of which is "difference" except in the most liberal sense. Society isn't threatened by difference, exactly, in this view. It is threatened by specific challenges to white supremacy and to het male supremacy--to the institutionalised ideologies and practices of each form of dominance and subordination. South Africa, for example, doesn't have a race binary, exactly. They have more than two categories of raced being. But guess which one is on top? Whiteness.

So it will be with any additional categories in a male supremacist system. It won't matter whether or not there are transmen, as long as cismen--cis HET men--are dominant. This is why, to me, "queer politics" is constructed to be liberal not radical, and largely anti-woman and anti-lesbian. From a dominant cultural standpoint, "lesbianism" rejects male supremacy by rejecting one of its key mandates: that all girls and women be sexually or otherwise physically and intimately involved with boys and men. To not do this is always seen by men-in-power as a big ol' fuck you to men. As if woman-loving couldn't possibly be anything else. It's all about the boyz. All the time. But, nonetheless, "d*kes" are beaten up for not being willing and welcoming of men's sexuality, which is to say men's invasions and violations of women and girls.

Gay males are rejected, ostracised, beaten, and occasionally killed by het men predominantly because, in the words of John Stoltenberg, they are seen to participate in the degraded status of the female. Bottom line: gay males are seen as men who suck dick and are fucked by dick. So whether lesbian or gay, these "orientations" are seen to threaten het male supremacy's codes of conduct: all dicks must be weapons used against women not men; and all women must be available for men's dick-tutorial target practice.

How, then, did we collectively arrive at a theory of "difference" (or of a conception and articulation of gender as a binary) when there's such glaring "dominance" and a well-protected (and generally invisibilised or naturalised) hierarchy? C. A. MacKinnon writes about this in detail--the very serious dangers to women of turning "dominance" into "difference" but specifically in terms of how the law recognises--or doesn't--that women aren't the same as men and also aren't just "different" from men. There are very real, dire consequences for women globally, and for anyone and everything else white het men dominate (including animals and the Earth) if male supremacy isn't even named when we discuss and challenge "gender".

My question, really for all of us who are trans- and inter-gender, is this: "what does it mean, materially, spiritually, socially, to say "we don't feel like [a specific sex]": who told us what "being female" or "being male" is supposed to feel like, be experienced as, or be socially made into? And, to the extent we don't identify with or feel at home in our bodies, can we at least respectfully discuss the many reasons why that occurs without politically privileging those that appear to re-biologise "sex"? How does "I don't feel like a female" compare to "I don't feel like a woman and didn't feel like a girl"? And how does a social program of genderqueer people demanding to be considered "men" and "women" by society and the State interrupt or challenge a "gender binary", anyway? How does sexual trauma in childhood effect our own "at-homeness" in our bodies. I'm not making the case that "everyone who wants to surgically change their bodies from one sex to another" is a survivor of sexual assault.

I'm suggesting that there are many reasons why we don't feel comfortable in our own skin, why we are repulsed by our bodies, why we feel alien inside them, etc. And these many reasons should be discussed online so that someone else who comes along and feels alien inside their skin can have many ways to understand this, and not just have a few people referring them to a doctor who has their own interests to sell a way of understanding "gender dysphoria". Gender dysphoria needs to be unpacked, as well as regarded as real.

Why are so many white class-privileged queer-defined people unwilling to engage on these rather critical subjects while being willing to write about "the gender binary"? More queer lives are impacted by male dominance than by "a binary called sex". Most queer people's and most women's lives are greatly impacted by many forms of male supremacist values and practices than by "the binary problem". Most of our lives, worldwide are shaped horrifically by poverty, rape, trafficking, famine, HIV, corporate/class warfare and globalisation, racism and genocide, nuclear and other toxic/lethal waste, and the social degradation of female human beings globally. These are not "ideas" that must be engaged: they are hard-core realities that must be challenged and ended.

Discussing "the gender binary" is a politically mistaken and socially irresponsible way to refer to "what's wrong with gender", which is that men are killing, maiming, and otherwise harming women and girls. All over the planet. To invisibilise a political hierarchy called "gender" is part of the work of pro-patriarchs, who pretend cisgender women are the most powerful people on Earth. Why are queer folks doing that work for heteropatriarchal cis men? They really do know how to do it by themselves (well, with women raising them, feeding them, tending to them, and otherwise nurturing them throughout their lifetimes). If we're to end male dominance and male violence, wouldn't it make sense for all of us who are not cis het men, and a few who are, to join together in the struggle to challenge and dismantle patriarchal oppression?