Debates that shouldn't be debates
Everyone should be anti-genocide and pro-human freedom, and yet!
Vol. 42
In This Issue: ESSAY-ISH | READ LOCAL | NOW READ THIS | FINAL FRAME
I’ve been helping out on the periphery of the UW Madison solidarity encampment and protest this week and heartened by the passion, moral clarity, and dedication of the students and allies who’ve turned out for it and the hundreds of other pro-Palestine protests across the country (and the world).
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the reactions to this protest movement, but instead of me writing a whole thing, I encourage you to read instead this piece at Defector by the always excellent David Roth, who I think hits some very important nails on the head (and does so with some truly fantastic turns of phrase). Here’s a little taste:
There is something terribly clarifying in how eager the people in power at these universities have been to betray the trust of everyone invested in those institutions. Institutions that otherwise exist from one exploratory committee to the next will change university policies on the fly so that their local uniformed violence workers will get their chance to thump some young skulls; administrators whose notional jobs are upholding communities of learning and care gladly consent to being upbraided by clownish golf hogs and half-fascist nullities in Congress and then do exactly what they were told to do, whatever the damage to those communities. If the students and professors in these protests, which are now nationwide, have a sort of advantage simply by being the only parties involved that actually care about anything, they are also up against an opposition that is all the more implacable because of how proudly cynical it is.
Meanwhile, I did take time to write a whole thing in response to yet another terrible and misguided opinion piece–published, disappointingly, in the Cap Times–wherein the author argues that transgender women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
Which is bullshit for so many reasons, and I did my best to lay out some of those reasons in my response, also published in the Cap Times. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Interestingly, a first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed study came out shortly after I wrote this, commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, that actually looked at athletic performance in trans women and men in comparison to cis women and men. This approach and the results are in sharp contrast to so much of the fear-mongering that essentially calls trans women “men” and uses cis male performance metrics as evidence that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to compete with their fellow women. The study actually shows that trans women under-performed compared to cis women in everything from lung capacity to lower body strength to bone density.
I don’t fool myself into thinking that more and better science will stop the bigots from bigot’ing, but I do think it’s important to have a better understanding of how HRT impacts trans people’s bodies, athletic performance included, so us trans folks can have a better idea of how to navigate transition care, sports, and life–and to help guide better, more equitable sporting guidelines. Of course, that’s a far more nuanced conversation and process than the bigots are capable of having–so that’s a whole other thing we have to deal with, first. Sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend so much time and energy simply demanding that we should be treated with dignity and respect in the first place, though.
Meanwhile, I also had the honor of being featured by the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project for a fun profile. I chatted with a young queer person who is just starting her career as a writer and, delightfully, from the Philippines but volunteering to work with the History Project because she wanted to learn more about and get more connected to the LGBTQ community globally.
You can read that piece here. It’s always a trip to be the one getting interviewed, instead of doing the interviewing!
Read Local.
Responding to bad takes from centrist white men in local media could be a full time job. After some very bad takes about housing and development in Madison, here are two excellent responses, courtesy of the folks at Tone:
“Someone Paid for You” [Christina Lieffring at Capitol Punishments]
Someone paid for you. This is why my generation (Millennial) is so frustrated with the Baby Boomers. Your parents and grandparents’ generations paid money out of their own pockets so your generation could have a better life. You had access to affordable university education, because someone paid for you. But your generation, our parents’ generation, has not done the same. That is why we’re still saddled with student loan debt—since the 1980’s, your generation has cut how much state funding goes to public universities. Even though the Baby Boomers experienced stagflation in the 1970’s, for two decades Baby Boomers have called Millennials lazy and entitled, even though our salaries have not kept up with productivity—meaning our employers have grossly underpaid us—our whole adult life. What little progress we have made with our incomes has been eaten up by rising costs that are not discretionary. Food. Healthcare. Housing. And yet your generation (generally) has been so dismissive of our concerns and our proposals for how to make the world more liveable for future generations.
“The housing take that aged me” [Scott Gordon for Tone]
This column takes place in a universe where the accomplishments of the past magically overshadow the problems of the present. Fanlund is right to ask, in the column's headline, whether Madison is "becoming two cities." Really, it's been far more fragmented than that for a very long time. Still, you could divide it up into two broad populations: People who can afford to rest on some very crusty progressive-city laurels, and people who are wondering whether they have a future here at all.
Now Read This.
“Categorizing your Whites” [Lyz Lenz and Garrett Bucks at Men Yell at Me]
I’d argue that the desire to be a “good man” or “good White person” or a “good rich person” has stealthily done as much damage, both to individual relationships and to efforts for social change, as any other myth about privilege. I mean, let’s talk about what’s happening when our primary desire — as a person with a particular type of societal power — is to look good or be declared good by a woman or a person of color. You’re not actually caring about other people; you’re caring about yourself. And you’re also going to be artificially separating yourself from the very people with whom you should be figuring out all this nonsense.
“The Republican Party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement” [Rebecca Solnit for The Guardian]
…if fascism really comes to America, it won’t come just as a single figure. It will come sneaking in, as local, state and federal laws and the gradual erosion of rights pushed by many players at many levels. In fact it has been coming at us all along. It is right now, among other things, a full-fledged anti-sex movement.
“How autocracy uses transphobia to justify itself” [Gillian Branstetter at The Autonomy]
For the nationalist, those “settled and hierarchical binaries” that make up patriarchal gender roles are inseparable from the “settled and hierarchical binaries” that make up their racist worldview. Both the transsexual and the migrant loom large as agents of chaos and threats to the desired order because their own agency challenges those hierarchies and threatens to reveal those binaries as artifice. It is not merely a small minority of sexual deviants the anti-gender authoritarian hopes to control, but anyone who strays from a eugenic reproductive regime that lies at the heart of nationalist philosophy, colonial supremacy, and the logic of capitalism.
Final Frame.
The Palestine Solidarity Encampment on Library Mall at the UW-Campus, as it was going up on Monday, April 29.
‘Til Next Time.
Thanks for reading and for standing up for your friends and neighbors! Take care of each other out there.
Always feel free to hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots or good books. And please feel free to forward this email to a friend and/or hit that subscribe button. xoxo