Professional Bad Influence

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.

here’s gerda and lilly together

not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.

i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.

here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings

Content warnings: Rape, abuse, discrimination, transphobia, specifically transphobia against trans men.

One such example of the rapist and abuser tactic of being a prolific blogger and kind of a keyboard activist who wrote a lot of posts about how trans women are integral for trans women and you can only trust trans women was (sigh) monetizeyourcat AKA MYC. There are still some old posts up on my blog about her. Literally from back in the day people who knew her:

1, 2.

One other was “b8l” who was one of the original “baeddel bloggers.” Here’s a short retrospective post explaining who the baeddel bloggers were. Here’s a longer one, more detailed and in-depth on their ideology and has more sources. If it seems odd that i’m bringing up things that happened in 2014-2015, reading through that last post kind of makes it more clear that even movements that people can claim are “over and done with” have connective tissue to today.

All of the perpetrators I just mentioned fucking Posted Through It in the most egregious ways. Nobody willingly took accountability, people had to fucking proactively kick them out of their social circles and it took significant time and effort.

But there is one thing from the original post that I do think it’s necessary to expound on: The socioeconomic context of this. Because beliefs don’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does sexual abuse and rape. These things don’t simply happen because of “evil individuals,” even though I think it’s OK to describe rapists as “evil” because of what they did.

Transfeminine people, especially youth, are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Why is this? Because they are often abused or ostracized by their own families, and in places like the USA where there is practically zero social safety net, accepting an offer to join a sketchy housing situation by an older person in the same demographic as you is more likely. This kind of thing does not only happen to transfeminine people of course. But afaik it’s statistically slightly more common.

The other thing that makes us vulnerable to abuse is because we are feminized subjects in society. By “feminized subjects” i guess you could say “Treated in a woman-like way.”

Unfortunately, if you’re a woman, you will not only be treated as a woman by men, but also other women.

So, it’s a double-struggle, involving both transmisogyny and capitalism, at bare minimum. I don’t really know what this kind of struggle would look like for an ultra-wealthy trans person, so I’m mostly speaking about the working class here.

My reaction to this fact is not, of course, to say that people who merely don’t experience transmisogyny are a class of enemies. I know and have known trans men who are ardent feminists. Where, I say, is the ruthless criticism of parents who abuse and abandon their own children? Of religious leaders, politicians, and business owners who spread hate? And, lastly, if someone’s “found family” is an abusive found family, why can’t we criticize that?

In the current economic order, “found family” has basically the same inherent problems with its power dynamics as one’s “original family.” If you don’t make a significant portion of the household income, if you don’t own the house, if your name is not on the lease of that apartment, you may actually be an extremely vulnerable subject within your own household.

This is due to the current mode of economic production in society. And who maintains that mode of production?

The real and primary enemy, the particular class that is the biggest obstacle for transfeminine people, all trans people, all LGBT+ people, and the entire working class, is the fucking bourgeoisie. The capital-owning class.

But back to domestic abuse.

It’s not a sign of a socially coherent community if your town (or your state, province, county, parish, etc) has an intermittent exodus of LGBT+ youth out of it. That indicates there is something deeply wrong with your entire society.

I don’t look at places that were recipients of queer exoduses and managed a half-baked truce like, for example, San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and (sigh) Seattle as success stories. Rather, they became the sites of new forms of immiseration, even as they (and other cities, and some entire states) were held up as some kind of safe haven. Speaking generally, working class LGBT+ people in the modern era have historically had a slightly better time in cities as opposed to small towns, but a safe haven where you can’t afford the rent and have to live out of your car isn’t very “safe” in practice.

Note that one of the things that people (correctly) note as an indicator of some degree of safety is the presence of local laws against discrimination and the presence of the designation of “hate crimes.” But these have some inherent problems with them, such as the fact that if you are dependent on your abuser for income or housing, you kind of can’t accuse them without your life being turned upside down.

So, with all this in mind, one of the important things to consider about anyone’s political views is “Who benefits from believing this?”

Are we not gonna talk about the source filmmaker banner