Tenderness and Cismisandry

Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage, carrara marble (installed at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY), 2002

Just because a man doesn’t call me a faggot to my face anymore doesn’t mean he still isn’t a homophobe that privately thinks I should be stoned to death. You’re not addressing the problem, you’re literally ignoring it. It doesn’t even mean that, privately, I still won’t get beaten or called slurs because hey it’s out of the public eye. As long as it looks like I’m being tolerated then it’s all cool right?

All it did was just move it to the shadows. Let people continue their bigotry behind closed doors so that when there wasn’t societal pressure to keep it hidden, like, say when a President is openly bigoted and shouts at rallies that “PC has gone mad and we can’t say what we think,” suddenly it’s all back in the open again. Hate crimes go up, violence and slurs and open hatred start becoming a norm again. Nazis might say lead torch lit rallies to synagogues, mosques, and black churches.

Sure, I’d be happy to explain in full detail.

I don’t like RuPaul because he regularly uses transphobic slurs and claims that the trans people who ask him to stop just have bruised egos.

I don’t like RuPaul because he claims that “no one has ever said the word tr*nny in a derogatory sense.”

I don’t like RuPaul because he stated on-air that he believes the only difference between men in drag and trans women is “About twenty-five thousand dollars and a good surgeon.”

I don’t like RuPaul because he had to be pressured by his network in order to discontinue a game on his show where his contestants attempted to clock drag queens the way they do trans women by labeling them with the s-slur.

I don’t like the RuPaul because he proudly defended Shirley Q. Liquor, a drag queen who performs in literal blackface. He said Liquor is “not racist” and “Critics who think Shirley Q. Liquor is offensive are idiots.”

I don’t like the show because one of its most popular contestants created a YouTube video where he “appeared to shoot and kill a trans woman (caricatured as having a wig and mustache) for objecting to certain language used by drag queens.” (This link is a step removed, as I’m not comfortable linking my followers directly to that kind of violence.)

He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violence– especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers. 

At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed. 

But it wasn’t the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didn’t want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.

So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms weren’t from trauma. The memories weren’t real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. That’s where the shittiest parts of Freud’s theories emerged. Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.

By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.

And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0959353596062015

If you don’t have access bc paywall, here’s a decent summary on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freudian_Coverup

Some vague proof:’

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/24/science/freud-secret-documents-reveal-years-of-strife.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=0

An essay on the topic:

http://socialistreview.org.uk/404/whats-wrong-sigmund-freud