Logorrhea blog

Fear of medicalization is a weapon of transphobia. Lots of people actually are scared of needles, scared of surgery, or don't want to medicalize their appearance. But they're able to hold casual conversation about injections and surgeries and medication when it's about anything other than transition.

Transphobia trains people to think of the grotesque parts of medicalization as a kneejerk reaction to mentioning a procedure. When you talk about an estrogen shot, you imagine the needle piercing the skin. When you talk about SRS, you imagine the skin being sliced into. When you talk about laser, you imagine the burning of the follicle.

Does that imagery give you a gut reaction? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you squirm a little? Cuz I'd bet you could read those same words and screen out most of that feeling when talking about any other procedure. It's not that the fear isn't real. It's that your brain is programmed to take down its defenses against that rush of feeling when we talk about transition, as opposed to any other medical procedure. You can rationally know that transition related procedures have a ridiculously low complication rate and a ridiculously high satisfaction rate, but your mind is still feeding on that basal reaction all the same.

It's transphobia. It always is. It's decades of rhetoric about "butchers" and "mutilation" and lying about medical statistics, the imagery of little girls being carved up to be more masculine and the abhorrent description of vaginoplasty as "chopping your dick off". It invisibly seeps into people's brains, and gives them a more direct, unfiltered connection between their basal disgust with medicalization and seeing those words written out in text.

And no, you're not innocent of this if you're trans. Don't make that excuse for yourself. In fact, I would say that the call is coming from inside the house almost as much as its coming from outside. The way that some trans people talk about medical transition, even if they're positive towards it on its face, shows a connection to the grotesqueness of all medicalization that doesn't happen when talking about anything else.

The aromantic allegations can't catch me because it turns out I'm just a lesbian, actually

Going on cute little dates is fun when you're attracted to them. Surprisingly. I have a little girlfriend now and I like her

99.87% of the mass of the solar system is the Sun. That barely visible sliver of red pixels represents the 0.13% of mass that everything else in the solar system consists of. All planets, moons, asteroids big and small, satellites, and buttered toast is in that little wedge.

"The Sun is big," she announced, and the whole bus clapped. I've got another seven pie charts to get through. This will follow the usual zoom-and-enhance system. So the next chart you see will be the share of mass for everything that isn't the Sun, and so on. Let's do it!

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”