“I F*cking Hate @RuPaul”

boing
133

After reading your post, I figured I’d reiterate this point. At which point are people’s identities/traits different enough that using a single word to describe them is no longer appropriate? At some point, doesn’t a word become so generic as to lose its usefulness when describing diverse people?

Molloy seems to not want to be included in the same community as drag performers, because she feels their identities do not reflect her own. She’s most certainly not the only trans person who feels that way. I don’t understand the desire to push people together into a single community because of a single, shared trait (gender variance), even though many of their other traits and experiences make them very different people.

For example, a drag performer isn’t usually worried about transition, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, living their lives as the gender with which they identify when it doesn’t match the one assigned at birth. Drag performers may face stigma for dressing in drag for performances, but they aren’t usually concerned with getting legal documentation for their gender identity, aren’t required to out themselves at work, etc. I also don’t think drag is usually considered something so important, so fundamental to a person’s identity, that would-be drag performers commit suicide because they’re unable to participate in a show.

Surely, while both drag performers and transsexual people have in common the challenging of traditional gender roles/expectations, their experiences, concerns, and needs are different enough that insisting they belong to the same group does a disservice to them both. I don’t think Molloy takes issue with RuPaul or Carmen Carrera existing. With RuPaul, it’s the fact that he paints all trans people as drag performers, trivializes struggles with gender identity, and makes it look as if some of these life or death issues are nothing more than recreation. With Carrera, I think it’s the concept, due to Carrera’s own path, that all transsexual persons are drag performers first, and that it’s simply an outgrowth of participation in that area. I’ve only seen Carrera speak a few times, and I never really got that impression, but I can understand why it’s scary should someone feel that’s what she represents.

I agree that there is enough trouble from outside the LGBT community that internal conflicts would seem to be less important. But I really think trying to keep everyone under the transgender umbrella, and calling out people who want to differentiate themselves from others in the group, is what brings about these conflicts. When people like RuPaul spread misinformation, co-opt terminology, and basically redefine people’s identities out from under them, how else are those people supposed to react?

2 Likes
134

I assume it’s referring to journalism “since/after the internet began to cannibalize print media.”

2 Likes
135

Is the idea of being called “cis” actually offensive?

Are you raising this to complain about the number of labels you already have? It feels like you are longing for a time that you could just be some guy without thinking about your sexual orientation, race, class, mental health issues, mobility disabilities, nationality, gender identity, etc.

But members of various minorities, to different extents, are constantly reminded of their minority status, and a big part of that is everyone assuming that they are part of the majority. If we just assume everyone is straight, cis, sighted and neuro-typical until we learn otherwise, then we are putting a big burden on people who fall out of these categories to make space for themselves because we aren’t making any space for them.

Basically you learned a word. Cis isn’t just not-trans anymore than heterosexual is merely not-homosexual. It is a positive identification that describes a part of a person that many cis people aren’t even aware of. To borrow a thought experiment from Julia Serano, would you take ten million dollars to permanently change your sex and live as a member of the other sex? For most people the answer is no. Given that, the alignment of their unconscious and physical sexes is not just a neutral fact, it is a very important thing to their self-concepts.

This is really don’t get. It only isolates you if you think it does. I have friends on different parts of the autism spectrum… does acknowledging the truth of that and the different life experiences that come with that isolate me from them, or help us understand each other?

4 Likes
136

Saying “Gaddafi was a terrible man” is not the same thing as “I fucking hate Gaddafi”

The strongly held opinion should get a mention in the article as part of full-disclosure. To leave it out is misleading-by-omission.

137

I disagree. That’s not how this conversation goes down in the end.

That said, Andrea James is a transwoman. Did you poll all transwomen on earth? What if a significant number do happen to agree with Andrea James? So where does that leave us? At the beginning? No. I’m not one to think that one representative of a class is going to be able to make remarks on behalf of the whole class- in fact that’s what James is asserting in denigrating Molloy’s blanket condemnation. That said, Molloy can’t speak out both sides of her mouth as a journalist. She should have written an obviously more critical piece if she was going to express her extreme dislike for RuPaul. There is something to be said for journalistic ethics.

You say poe-tay-to, I say poh-tah-toh. That’s semantics. At its core, journalism is diary writing. That doesn’t make it the same as diary writing.

2 Likes
138

I applaud you for that, but you are very much in the minority. Again, the mainstream public, most of which lacks your critical thinking skills, is being told that there is no difference between drag queens and transsexuals by a very powerful (read: inappropriately powerful) gender-variant person.

Interestingly, there are far more drag queens who co-opt trans identities than there are transsexuals who still claim drag. It seems to have become almost as much an art form as drag performance itself, and as I said, it’s bullying behavior when one group forces their identity onto others who do not share it in order to ‘bring them down to their level.’ That may sound harsh, but the so-called ‘trans community’ puts up fences among it’s subgroups for a reason which was summed up nicely by AKP a few posts up:

[quote=“akp”]
For example, a drag performer isn’t usually worried about transition, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, living their lives as the gender with which they identify when it doesn’t match the one assigned at birth. Drag performers may face stigma for dressing in drag for performances, but they aren’t usually concerned with getting legal documentation for their gender identity, aren’t required to out themselves at work, etc. I also don’t think drag is usually considered something so important, so fundamental to a person’s identity, that would-be drag performers commit suicide because they’re unable to participate in a show.[/quote]

In other words, at the end of the day, an overwhelming majority of drag queens are cis men with male privilege who caricature women for fun and profit, and they do so from a sensational, and very misogynistically male perspective even as their leaders attempt to define others who do not.

3 Likes
139

Are you saying that drag queens are the equivalent of blackface?

1 Like
140

Those weren’t my words. Drag queens don’t steal performance opportunities from cis females as blackface did from blacks.

Although, there is such a thing as ‘trans-face.’

1 Like
141

Something tells me that “educator” is an an example of loaded terminology.

142

I don’t think this is fair. An extreme minority of drag queens are working for “fun and profit.” You might say a person who performs Death of a Salesman in a small amateur theatre is co-opting the story of a person with depression for “fun and profit” but that’s likely not the case at all.

Drag Queens, whether they know what it is like to be trans or not, probably for the most part do know what it is like to be excluded, to be made to feel like freaks, and to be told that who they want to be is wrong. They don’t know your story but they do know their own, and performance art is ultimately about self expression.

4 Likes
143

Those who are nodding in approval of this article because they support people being nicer online and not getting outraged and vindictive might want to take a look at the author’s Twitter feed, where she’s hounding Parker, making fun of her apologies and calling her a “skin-transvestite”, insinuating she’ll get her fired, and comparing trans women who disagree with her to the woman-suit killer from Silence of the Lambs. This is not someone who genuinely cares about people being nicer and more tolerant, she’s just using that rhetoric to manipulate you for your support and boost her own public profile.

6 Likes
145

I never claimed that what RuPaul is up to is right and good and sweetness and light. I’m only pointing out that Andrea James’s criticisms of Molloy can be valid, while Molloy’s criticisms of RuPaul can be valid, and all the while there is no need to pretend everyone is a mortal enemy of the other.

3 Likes
146

I had to read this article twice to discern it wasn’t written by a transphobic MRA. (‘Beta male’? Really?)

I don’t understand why some trans people want to rip each other down. I don’t always get why other people are upset or what the latest twitter row is, but I do know that solidarity is an important value for our community. Trans people often talk about ‘allies’, by which we mean cis people, but it’s also important for us to be allies to each other. If something is hurting a significant number of us, then we should give each other the same consideration we would want from allies. Mocking other people’s terminology or presentation or whatever is not the way forward.

I’m extremely disappointed to see this article on Boing Boing.

4 Likes
147

Battle lines have been drawn Abe. Sides have been picked. It doesn’t end until one side wins

148
149

There was a time before trigger warnings when people sat with their feelings and didn’t expect to be protected from anything that might challenge or upset them. It was kind of awesome. Now we seem to expect freedom from any speech that we don’t agree with, which seems to make dialog difficult and is not so different from Fox News viewers separating themselves from a liberal reality they can’t accept.

150

That disclaimer would need to be on top of almost every article on every site ever.

2 Likes
151

not all, just the “indecent” stuff.

1 Like
152

Good points all. I dunno, I meant more that I perhaps pine for a day where we can have different characteristics, without having to necessarily label everything. Describing and acknowledging differences is, to my mine, different than labeling them.

2 Likes
153

How can you describe and acknowledge differences without naming them? Wouldn’t that still require labels? :smile:

I prefer the approach of using labels as adjectives. For example, using “transgender person”, “trans woman”, “transsexual man” (depending on the person’s identification), rather than “a transgender” or “a transsexual”. I try to do the same for people’s ethnicities, sexual orientations, and whatever else, so that people are people with traits, not a single noun devoid of humanity. I feel it makes it more difficult for people to dismiss others when they’re explicitly referring to a person instead of a faceless identifier.

So, “John is a gay man”, not “John is a gay.” “Melissa identifies as a transgender woman”, not “Melissa is a transgender.” “Laura, a lesbian woman, organized our school’s GSA event”, not “Laura, a lesbian, organized our school’s GSA event”. I do recognize that it sometimes can get a bit cumbersome or makes things a bit too verbose, but I feel it’s important to try and maintain the humanity/personhood of people to keep from reducing them to a label. It’s far too easy to dismiss the experiences of people when you can lump them all together as “those gays”, “those transsexuals”, “those blacks”, “those asians”, etc.

2 Likes